Global Forest Watch is a new project from Google to highlight the deforestation that has been happening around the planet since the year 2000. Google is working with a lot of organizations to bring this information to light (including the World Resources Institute).
Global Forest Watch’s most valuable feature, developers say, is that it can be updated with new information every month, detecting “changes in forest cover in near-real-time.”
“Now that we have the ability to peer into forests, a number of telling stories are beginning to emerge,” Google said in a blog post.
The tool could change the way forests are managed, said Andrew Steer, president and chief executive of the World Resources Institute, in a statement.