Google Software Tracks Deforestation to Protect Forests

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Google's philanthropic arm, Google.org, recently unveiled new software that can actually track and monitor global deforestation. If the software becomes more widely implemented, it could serve as a useful tool in helping to cut carbon emissions and combat climate change.

Google.org worked with Greg Asner of the Carnegie Institution for Science and Carlos Souza of Imazon to develop the deforestation program. To evaluate deforestation in a certain area of the world, the software relies on past, present and future models of satellite image data. 


Handle computation in the cloud
What if we could offer scientists and tropical nations access to a high-performance satellite imagery-processing engine running online, in the "Google cloud"?

And what if we could gather together all of the earth's raw satellite imagery data -- petabytes of historical, present and future data -- and make it easily available on this platform?

Google decided to find out, by working with Greg and Carlos to re-implement their software online, on top of a prototype platform we've built that gives them easy access to terabytes of satellite imagery and thousands of computers in our data centers.

By processing a decades  of historical images, it is able to extract scientific information on how the size and shape of tree cover has changed over the years. Google hopes that by arming scientists and forest managers with this valuable data, they can better protect the world's forests.

Start with satellite imagery
Satellite imagery data can provide the foundation for measurement and monitoring of the world's forests. For example, in Google Earth today, you can fly to Rondonia, Brazil and easily observe the advancement of deforestation over time, from 1975 to 2001:

(Landsat images courtesy USGS)

This type of imagery data -- past, present and future -- is available all over the globe. Even so, while today you can view deforestation in Google Earth, until now there hasn't been a way to measure it.

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