EcoHack rundown
a gimcrack account - crossposted at blog.globalforestwatch.org
The environment has been hacked! In a good way.
Across four different time zones, technologists and environmentalists recently converged at the first global EcoHack, with events in San Francisco, New York City, São Paulo and Madrid. Their mission? Spend twenty-four hours building tools to protect and better understand the . . .
GFW alerting algorithm, peer reviewed
Alerts of forest disturbance from MODIS imagery
There has been a lot of press on GFW. News coverage includes articles in The Atlantic, Wired, Forbes, among many others. Many of the articles cite the 'near real-time' component of GFW, often in the headline. The methods paper that describes the near real-time component has just been published in the International Journal of Applied . . .
Development and Environment
A curmudgeonly report
The environment is not the most important thing in this world.
A strange thing to read, maybe, from the data team at an institution whose mission is to "move human society to live in ways that protect the Earth's environment." But the objective of any good think tank (and WRI is good) is to offer information that can . . .
Transparent correlation
the correlation in transparency
Only two think tanks received highest marks for transparency this year, the Center for Global Development and the World Resources Institute. Two members of the Data Lab, Dan Hammer and Robin Kraft, have worked at both. So ... infer away. Actually don't. This is an awesome article that illustrates why correlation does not imply causation. . . .
Website analytics
help us help you
We are not a lazy team. We just have a lot to do. (You've heard that before, maybe? But this time it's convincing, maybe?) We are asking you -- developers, statisticians, data scientists -- to help make the Global Forest Watch site better.
Global Forest Watch launched on February 20, 2014 to much fanfare. Even Jane Goodall . . .
Using the GFW API [update]
grabbing forest loss information, more efficiently
We recently posted an article about collecting information about forest cover loss using the GFW API. There, I said that the GFW API could not support multipolygons. That was true. It is true no longer. We have added support for multipolygons. This greatly simplifies the post, which spent an inordinate amount of time ripping apart . . .
Graduate Student Research Program
Announcement & Application
The Global Forest Watch (GFW) team is excited to announce the GFW Student Research Program (SRP). The idea, here, is to support innovative and policy-relevant research drawing on GFW data and GFW’s open source API. The SRP provides grants for eligible graduate students to pursue forest-related research and interact with expert staff from the . . .