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 Earth Observation and Geoinformation.

Alerts of forest disturbance from MODIS imagery

The title of the journal says it all. Applied earth observation. We built the system to detect forest clearing activity at a time scale commensurate with economic decisions. The 16-day updates provide a guide for field researchers to find and stop undue deforestation.