(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.
Then add science
With this technology, it's now possible for scientists to analyze raw satellite imagery data and extract meaningful information about the world's forests, such as locations and measurements of deforestation or even regeneration of a forest. In developing this prototype, we've collaborated with Greg Asner of
Carnegie Institution for Science, and Carlos Souza of
Imazon. Greg and Carlos are both at the cutting edge of forest science and have developed software that creates forest cover and deforestation maps from satellite imagery. Organizations across Latin America use Greg's program, Carnegie Landsat Analysis System (
CLASlite), and Carlos' program, Sistema de Alerta de Deforestation (
SAD), to analyze forest cover change. However, widespread use of this analysis has been hampered by lack of access to satellite imagery data and computational resources for processing.
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? We 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.
Here are the results of running CLASlite on the satellite imagery sequence shown above:
CLASlite online - This shows deforestation and degradation in Rondonia, Brazil from 1986-2008, with the red indicating recent activity
Here's the result of running SAD in a region of recent deforestation pressure in Mato Grosso, Brazil:
SAD online - The red "hotspots" indicate deforestation that has happened within the last 30 days
Combining science with massive data and technology resources in this way offers the following advantages:
- Unprecedented speed: On a top-of-the-line desktop computer, it can take days or weeks to analyze deforestation over the Amazon. Using our cloud-based computing power, we can reduce that time to seconds. Being able to detect illegal logging activities faster can help support local law enforcement and prevent further deforestation from happening.
- Ease of use and lower costs: An online platform that offers easy access to data, scientific algorithms and computation horsepower from any web browser can dramatically lower the cost and complexity for tropical nations to monitor their forests.
- Security, privacy and transparency: Governments and researchers don't want to share sensitive data and results before they are ready. Our cloud-based platform allows users to control access to their data and results. At the same time, because the data, analysis and results reside online, they can also be easily shared, made available for collaboration, presented to the public and independently verified — when appropriate.
- Climate change impact: We think that a suitably scaled-up and enhanced version of this platform could be a promising as a tool for forest monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV) in support of efforts such as REDD.
As a Google.org product, this technology will be provided to the world as a not-for-profit service. This technology prototype is currently available to a small set of partners for testing purposes — it's not yet available to the general public but we expect to make it more broadly available over the next year. We are grateful to a host of individuals and organizations (
find full list here) who have advised us on developing this technology. In particular, we would like to thank the
Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation for their close partnership since the initial inception of this project. The goal of the Moore Foundation’s Environmental Conservation Program is to change the ways in which people use important terrestrial and coastal marine ecosystems to conserve critical ecological systems and functions, while allowing sustainable use. We're also working with the Group on Earth Observations (
GEO), a consortium of national government bodies, inter-governmental organizations,
space agencies and research institutions through GEO's Forest Carbon Tracking (FCT) task force. Last month together we
launched the
GEO FCT portal and are now exploring how we can also together bring the power of this new technology to tropical nations.
We're excited to be able to share this early prototype and look forward to seeing what's possible.
Posted by Rebecca Moore, Engineering Manager, Google.org and Dr. Amy Luers, Environment Manager, Google.org
Follow