JAKARTA — An effort by the Indonesian government to compile a single map of land-use cover across the vast archipelago is nearing completion seven years after it began, but continues…
Dwarfed both in size and fame by the Amazon rainforest, the Gran Chaco, South America’s second largest vegetation complex, is a diverse mix of thorny dry forest and palm savannahs…
LONG LAMAI, Malaysia — The tallest tajem trees have slash marks clear up to the canopy. Each diagonal cut released some of the tree’s heart-stopping sap to tip someone’s darts,…
Satellite imagery has transformed how we assess changes in forest cover. The standard optical sensors carried by Earth-orbiting satellites capture the energy from sunlight reflected off objects on the Earth’s…
JAKARTA — The Indonesian government has still not made publicly available its detailed maps and related documents on plantation companies operating in the country, a year after the nation’s highest…
Tens of thousands of indigenous people in the Peruvian Amazon have been fighting decades of contamination of their natural resources by foreign and domestic oil companies. Oil spills, leaky pipelines,…
JAKARTA — A team of scientists from Indonesia, Germany and the Netherlands has won a competition two years in the making to come up with a fast, accurate and cost-effective…
JAKARTA — Zely Ariane, an editor at the Tabloid Jubi newspaper in Indonesia’s easternmost region of Papua, gets frustrated each time an acquaintance travels there and asks to meet up…
JAKARTA — The daunting task of mapping Indonesia’s vast peatlands in painstaking detail has entered the home stretch, as competing proposals vie for selection as the standard to be adopted…
Imagine you needed to map the spread of an invasive plant species in a tropical forest. Hyperspectral imaging and LiDAR are great at identifying vegetation, but have their limitations and…
The Brazilian Amazon lost 184 km2 of forest in December 2017, according to the country’s Institute of Man and the Environment of the Amazon (Imazon). The data, obtained exclusively by…
Technology is changing how we investigate and protect planet Earth. The increased portability and reduced cost of data collection and synthesis tools, for instance — from visual and acoustic sensors…
Where deforestation is widespread, sometimes it’s hard to see the (loss of) forest for the (loss of) trees. Global Forest Watch’s online forest change monitoring platform has added a new…
Technology above the clouds is helping scientists study sharks beneath the waves. A new initiative combines shark movement data with publicly available vessel identification data—both transmitted to researchers via satellite—to…
JAKARTA – Marsudi has mixed feelings about the visit earlier this month by Indonesian President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo to his small village of Nganduk in East Java province. On the…
A satellite-based alert system can now detect fine-scale deforestation in near-real time, enabling managers or rangers in tropical forests to respond to early stages of deforestation. Anyone can now register…
Yesterday The Leonardo Dicaprio Foundation unveiled an ambitious plan to protect and connect 50 percent of the world’s land area as part of a broader effort to curb global warming,…
A team of biologists and computer scientists plan to map a global “safety net” for Planet Earth. The mapping effort, to be led by Washington, D.C.-based non-profit research organization RESOLVE…
Across the swath of vertebrate lifeforms that inhabit Earth, scientists have a pretty good idea about where most of the known land mammals, birds and amphibians live. That makes identifying…
Colombia is home to more bird species than any other country on Earth. It’s also well-known for a long-simmering conflict that has only recently begun to cool. Now, a pair…
