Forest conservation may not sound like the most exciting thing to discuss amongst the topics relating to climate change and environmental issues, but it is a crucial part that we have to tackle, especially in the classrooms. But unless you live right smack in the middle of even near the forest, it’s hard to visualize something as vast as that. The Global Forest Change Explorer is a website developed by several entities including Google Earth Engine to engage young people into getting into forest conservation.

Because lectures on how our forests are slowly dying and how this will affect the whole earth eventually are usually not enough, this is a more visual and interactive way of fostering discussion with students on this topic. There are maps and activity sheets to enable students to have interactive analysis. There is an Explorer Tool that can show visualizations of certain forests’ loss and gain over the years and you will be able to compare them to other countries and ecoregions. You will even be able to predict causes in the changes of forest density.

Lest you think that the information given here is just something pulled out of thin air, they are actually open data that uses remote sensing and is used by actual professionals in their work. This tech was developed years back with Google Earth Engine by researchers at the University of Maryland. They were able to map the global forests loss and gain from 2000-2012. These findings are now part of the website for use by the younger generation.

The Global Forest Change Explorer website has been created by Science in the Classroom, Dr. Matt Hansen of the University of Maryland who headed the team that mapped out the original data, and of course the Google Earth Engine. It’s free and teachers who want to discuss this topic should take full advantage of it.

SOURCE: Google

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