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Global Forest Watch-Fires using High-Resolution Imagery to better respond to Fires

Posted on July 22, 2014 by Megan Gottfried

Fires across Indonesia are one of the largest threats to the life, environment, and people who rely on Indonesian land. To address these risks, Blue Raster partnered with the World Resources Institute (WRI), Esri, DigitalGlobe, Google and others to launch the Global Forest Watch-Fires (GFW-Fires) online platform. GFW-Fires was built using Esri’s ArcGIS Server and ArcGIS API for Javascript. The platform contains comprehensive information on the locations of fires, land use, land cover and conservation areas.

Users can view locations of fires on peat lands, which has become imperative due to environmental and health implications, including haze and smoke that result from burning on high carbon soils. FORESTS News reports that, “Peat fires were the largest single source of greenhouse gas emissions in 2005 (larger than energy).” What makes this application truly exceptional, is the addition of DigitalGlobe’s remarkable 50 centimeter resolution satellite imagery, giving a bird’s eye view sharp enough to see each tree on the ground.

With the help of NASA’s MODIS data and imagery, used to locate the fires, DigitalGlobe can now be directed to a location to take super high resolution images. This imagery is so clear that you can easily distinguish between healthy and dead vegetation, the type of vegetation effected, view and draw burn area boundaries, and detect previously existing burn scars. This allows accountability to be assigned to the fires, as one now has the tools to investigate where and how these fires have started. What was once a point on a map can now be confirmed through close to real-time imagery. In addition, the user can then view wind direction and air quality data, key components of determining who will be effected downwind.

Often, a fire may be located in Indonesia, but the toxic air is carried to a neighboring island in Malaysia or Singapore. By utilizing the ArcGIS Image Extension for Server, the platform computes and provides statistics on a selected area of interest, and allows the user to export the analysis in a report. In order to get this information to the public, GFW-Fires also offers an SMS Alerts system, using the Twilio platform. The addition of this capability has made it possible for Global Forest Watch to achieve their goals of responding to environmental hazards faster than ever before. It is now possible to locate a fire, confirm and analyze the fire, and get the word out through SMS Alerts in a matter of minutes.

Using the extensive amount of data available on the platform, users have the capacity to voice their concern and request change towards a sustainable future free of dangerous smog and land conflict.

Susan Minnemeyer, WRI’s Senior Mapping and Data Manager for Global Forest Watch, says:

“The website puts near-real time data and analysis tools in the hands of citizens and decision makers to learn more about developing fires crises and effectively respond. Working with Blue Raster, we were able to develop the site over only a few weeks and automate analysis our GIS team had been doing in house.”

Read more by the World Resources Institutes’ blog series on Indonesia Forest Fires.

GFW Commodities – Tools for Greenhouse Gas Emissions

Posted on June 4, 2014 by Megan Gottfried

A new initiative from the World Resources Institute (WRI) and the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) aims to shed light on how individual oil palm concessions affect forest information that can empower companies to manage their forests and supply chains more sustainably. Global Forest Watch-Commodities (GFW-Commodities), a new platform produced by Blue Raster combines the RSPO’s maps of certified sustainable palm oil production sites with global forest data like tree cover loss, forest clearance, locations of primary forests and legal land classifications. Armed with these new maps and knowledge, companies can reduce the risk that the palm oil they purchase contributes to deforestation.

WRI analysis has shown that companies, communities, NGOs and different levels of government often have different information about forest use. These maps will act as a universally available, coherent and current source of information for any of these above groups to utilize in their work to make palm oil production sustainable for the environment and the communities that rely on it.

GFW-Commodities was built on Esri’s ArcGIS Server and ArcGIS API for JavaScript. It leverages the Image Extension for ArcGIS Server, to compute, analyze and provide statistics on tree cover loss over time, near real time forest clearing and fires within selected areas of interest. The analysis features come out-of-the-box with Esri’s Image Extension for ArcGIS Server. Satellite data including Landsat and MODIS are mosaiced and allow for analysis on-the-fly as users explore their areas of interest.

Key features of each tool:

Suitability Mapper
- Ability to set own suitability criteria based on a range of environmental factors
- Identifies degraded areas as alternative to development on forest areas
Forest Analyzer
- Detailed land cover data, include data layers on forests, tree cover, and peat lands all important to zero deforestation goals and climate change strategies
- Additional data layers on protected areas and population density
RSPO Support tool
- – Never-before accessible maps of certified areas for palm oil production
- – Analysis of forest change on certified areas
- – Analysis necessary for RSPO compensation procedure

Features of all three tools:

Option for users to upload their own shape file for analysis
Download data and results for further analysis

The Global Forest Watch platform is at the forefront in its field and will continue to grow and evolve with its use, applying technology for a sustainable world. Read more about the project and WRI’s efforts towards sustainability in Wired magazine – “How a New Map of Palm Oil Plantations Could Help Save Rainforests.”

Videos of Application:

Featured at Esri UC 2014

Tutorial by World Resources Institute

Atlas of Forest Landscape Restoration Opportunities

Posted on May 28, 2014 by Christina Nordling

The world has lost almost half of its original forest cover, largely tied to accelerated population growth and agricultural expansion. Although forests are quickly disappearing, there is a tremendous amount of unused land that if restored, could support woodlands. Through the Atlas of Forest Landscape Restoration Opportunities, it has been found that more than 2 billion hectares (about 8 million square miles) of land worldwide have the potential to be restored, many of which are located in unexpected regions.

Blue Raster and the World Resource Institute created an online mapping application helping users find suitable land for sustainable agriculture. Sustainability and Restoration are key components of saving our environment, so these map projects are extremely useful tools.

The Atlas also shows restoration potential for individual countries and regions. For example, Cambodia’s tropical forests have been damaged by illegal logging and plantations giving it the highest percentage of land in the world (30 percent) with opportunity for wide-scale restoration. Many opportunities for restoration lie in the northern portion of the country due to low population density. The areas of land highlighted in red represent deforestation that has occurred within the last decade.

Built using the ArcGIS API for JavaScript and ArcGIS Server, the application allows analysis of potential land use and can help professionals better understand and visualize actions, such as forest restoration, that need to be taken in order to save resources that we all rely on.

Suitability Mapper: Finding Sustainable Palm Oil Sites

Posted on May 13, 2014 by Brendan Collins

The power of GIS as a tool to help manage our planet’s natural resources is limited only by the insightfulness of our questions. Fortunately, more timely and detailed data becomes available every year, so we are free to ask an ever-wider range of questions, such as:

In relation to agriculture, what factors affect our ability to sustainably produce crops, and how do these factors change across the landscape?
Where should agriculture expand, and where should it retract?

Blue Raster, along with partners World Resources Institute (WRI) and Sekala, has developed an interactive web application allowing users to customize criteria for sustainable agriculture and find sites for sustainable palm oil across Indonesia.

Upon entering the Suitability Mapper, users visualize various layers superimposed on the Indonesian landscape including elevation, hill slope, rainfall, and soil acidity. WRI provides a two-color layer showing the distribution of areas deemed “potentially suitable” (purple) and “unsuitable” (yellow) for sustainable palm oil production.

Taking analysis a step further, the user can adjust the criteria for this suitability layer by adjusting controls linked to each palm oil variable. In the screenshot below, I have adjusted the suitability analysis to increase the mandatory distance from conservation areas and water resources. With my custom analysis complete, I can use drawing tools to summarize the results for a specific area. Results include the area’s legal status, amount of suitable area, distance from nearby roads, legal status, and whether an oil palm concession already exists in the location.

The Suitability Mapper was built on top of Esri’s ArcGIS Server and ArcGIS API for JavaScript. Using the ArcGIS Image Extension for Server, we are able to analyze and compute accurate suitability maps in realtime based on user-supplied criteria. Instead of investing large amounts of time in software development and maintenance, we were able to use the out-of-the-box features of Esri’s Image Extension for ArcGIS Server to achieve the goals of the project. This platform will also make it easier to add more and better data as it becomes available, to continually improve our analysis, inform key stakeholders, and make better decisions.

Suitability Mapper is part of the Global Forest Watch platform which has many new features coming soon with the launch of its Commodities analysis tool. Stay tuned for more information and launch dates soon.

New WRI map confirms long suspected notions of natural resource rights across sub-Saharan Africa

Posted on January 14, 2014 by Adrienne Allegretti

The World Resources Institute (WRI) announced today the launch of their newest online mapping application, the Rights to Resources map. Built by Blue Raster, the tool visualizes resource rights in Africa and allows users to compare findings across countries and resources: water, trees, wildlife, minerals and petroleum.

The data displayed in the tool is the outcome of WRI’s systematic review of the national framework laws across the 5 resources. The results of which confirm long suspected notions that across sub-Saharan Africa, few national laws provide communities with strong, secure rights to the resources on their land and that rights to many high-value natural resources are held by the state.

For instance, take WRI’s example of the situation in Ghana:

“Naturally-occurring trees are nominally owned by the chieftaincy or traditional authorities, but commercial rights to timber species belong to the state. With only weak rights, many farmers are reluctant to plant timber trees. Some resort to destroying or removing trees on their farms before logging companies come to harvest.”

The new Rights to Resources application endeavors to strengthen and secure resource rights for communities in sub-Saharan Africa while incentivizing sustainable management of local resources.

To learn more about the project and review the application, check out WRI’s Land and Resource Rights project page.

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