ForestEyes

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Conservation of tropical forests is a socially and ecologically relevant issue because of its important role in the global ecosystem. They have a great diversity of fauna and flora, besides regulating the climate and rainfall, absorbing large quantities of carbon dioxide and being indigenous dwellings. Unfortunately, millions of hectares have been lost and degraded over the years.

The rainforests need to be protected and collective action to complement existing initiatives of conservation need to be created.

The ForestWatchers Project was created in 2012 with this purpose: to ally Citizen Science with forest monitoring. In one of its applications, remote sensing images of forested areas were classified into forest or non-forest with an automated classification algorithm and the accuracy of the resulting map could be further improved by volunteer observation on the Web.

Inspired by this application of ForestWatchers, this Citizen Science project wants citizens to help us to track deforestation. Volunteers will be classifying latest remote sensing tiles that are going to be the training set of a classification algorithm. This procedure is expected to be fast and cheap, helping to track deforestation even in places where does not exist any official monitoring programs on tropical forests.