A rainforest can be cut down and replaced with a tree plantation, and the land eventually looks green again. A map that only measures tree cover can miss what changed. Google’s 22 October ForTy release separates natural forests, planted forests, plantations and tree crops. It includes a global 2020 map and an early annual series covering 2017 to 2025, so you can see what replaced a forest as well as where trees disappeared. It uses AlphaEarth satellite embeddings alongside about 1.7 million labelled examples. Google reports 90% forest-type accuracy in validation at over 9,000 sites. The annual series is still an early release. For any particular patch of land, I’d check the imagery and class probabilities before drawing conclusions. The maps are freely available to explore in Earth Engine. This seems like a useful application of AI for checking whether apparent regrowth is actually a recovery of natural forest. https://deepmind.google/blog/beyond-tree-cover-mapping-the-worlds-forest-types/ Interactive map https://nature-trace.projects.earthengine.app/view/forest-typology submitted by /u/nukebuddy
Originally posted by u/nukebuddy on r/ArtificialInteligence