Google · European Union · Google DeepMind
Beyond tree cover: mapping the world’s forest types
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★ Tier-1 Source
Maxim Neumann and Charlotte Stanton.
Key facts
- Last year, they jointly released Natural Forests of the World 2020, a 10-meter resolution global map that separated natural forests from all other tree cover
- Their new early-release time series applies a similar approach to every year from 2017 to 2025
- The Forest Typology 2020 map [described in Scientific Data] and the new time series are now freely available on Google Earth Engine under an open license
- So, with IIASA and WRI, they validated ForTy against more than 9,000 randomly chosen sites around the world
Summary
A new 10-meter resolution map shows which of the world's forests are natural, planted, or farmed, and how they are changing over time. Protecting the planet's forests starts with a simple question: what type of forest are they looking at? Today, Google DeepMind and Google Research, together with the World Resources Institute (WRI) and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), are releasing Forest Typology (ForTy) 2020, a global map that categorizes every 10-by-10-meter patch of land on Earth into six distinct forest and land-use types, a key baseline for the EU's deforestation regulation. All forests store carbon and, together, forests are home to most of the world's land-based plant and animal species. Most global maps only indicate whether trees are present. The European Union's regulation on deforestation-free products (EUDR), for example, requires that products like coffee, cocoa or palm oil do not originate from land that was forest in 2020 and has since been converted to agriculture.