DeepMind releases 10-meter global forest-type map ForTy 2020
Original title: Beyond tree cover: mapping the world’s forest types
ForTy labels six land classes and adds a 2017–2025 series showing what replaced natural forest.
Google DeepMind and Google Research, with the World Resources Institute and IIASA, released Forest Typology (ForTy) 2020, a global map that classifies every 10-by-10-meter patch into six forest and land-use types. An early yearly series from 2017 to 2025 tracks conversions to plantations, tree-crop farms, or other land. The map is framed as a baseline for the EU deforestation regulation, going beyond earlier natural-forest versus other tree-cover mapping. Validation on more than 9,000 sites found the right forest type 90% of the time and forest versus non-forest 95% of the time.
- Categories follow FAO definitions, from primary forest to tree crops and other land.
- Training used about 1.7 million labeled locations and AlphaEarth Foundations embeddings.
- Each class includes a probability score rather than only a yes-or-no label.
- Natural Forests of the World 2020 only separated natural forest from other tree cover.
- Vendors
From the original article
6 min read at deepmind.google
A global map categorizing every 10-meter patch of land on Earth into distinct forest types.
By Maxim Neumann and Charlotte Stanton · deepmind.google
A short excerpt; the article and its images belong to the publisher. Summary, key facts and assessment above are AI-written from the article and can be wrong.