On today’s program we speak with Crystal Davis, the director of Global Forest Watch, a near-real-time forest monitoring system created by the World Resources Institute.

Mongabay has partnered with Global Forest Watch (GFW) over the years, and GFW has even funded some of our coverage of global forest issues. Crystal Davis, who is set to speak at the Earth Optimism Summit soon fills us in on how the GFW tool and dataset is being used to inform forest conservation initiatives right now, new features planned for the future, and her thoughts on the ways Big Data is changing how we approach conservation.

We also speak with Francesca Cunninghame, the Mangrove Finch Project Leader for the Charles Darwin Foundation for the Galapagos Islands. In this Field Notes segment, we’ll listen to the call of a mangrove finch, one of the rarest birds in the wild. There are only around 100 mangrove finch individuals left in the world due to threats from invasive species, and Cunninghame explains why the fact that researchers recently recorded a male finch singing in the wild in Madagascar is such exciting news.

Here’s this episode’s top news:

• Climate change-induced bleaching decimating Great Barrier Reef
• Brazil slashes environment budget by 43%
• Land titling for indigenous communities leads to forest protection, peer-reviewed study finds
• South Africa makes it legal to sell rhino horns
• Ebo forest great apes threatened by stalled Cameroon national park
• Reptiles being sold openly and illegally in Moroccan markets

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Follow Mike Gaworecki on Twitter: @mikeg2001

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