[HN Gopher] Tree cover loss - 2001-2020
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Tree cover loss - 2001-2020
Author : itstaken
Score : 114 points
Date : 2022-03-15 15:53 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.globalforestwatch.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.globalforestwatch.org)
| hbarka wrote:
| I've lived in newer suburban neighborhoods where some of the
| homeowners would cut their developer-planted trees down to
| branchless stubs, just as the trees were about to grow. I wonder
| what would explain the aversion to a tree. I suppose they don't
| want to clean leaves during fall. The beauty of nature be damned,
| if even one is aware of it in this instance.
|
| I've also lived in the city of San Francisco. The Department of
| Public Works has a tree database of all the tagged city trees.
| Now and then there would be a 311 call about a tree getting
| destroyed. If you try to plant a tree seedling it too would get
| pulled. Some of the reasons are that trees are equated with
| gentrification and raising the values of that block, thus raised
| rents. The beauty of nature be damned, because blight is much
| better.
|
| Have you ever driven through neighborhoods with trees and ones
| without and think of the difference?
|
| _Trees - Joyce Kilmer
|
| I think that I shall never see A poem lovely as a tree.
|
| A tree whose hungry mouth is prest Against the sweet earth's
| flowing breast;
|
| A tree that looks at God all day, And lifts her leafy arms to
| pray;
|
| A tree that may in summer wear A nest of robins in her hair;
|
| Upon whose bosom snow has lain; Who intimately lives with rain.
|
| Poems are made by fools like me, But only God can make a tree._
| clairity wrote:
| in LA, it's that time of the year where they butcher all the
| street trees for no discernable reason (the stated reasons like
| safety make no real sense). it's infuriating. we need more
| cover, not less, in this drying desert area.
| causi wrote:
| _Some of the reasons are that trees are equated with
| gentrification and raising the values of that block, thus
| raised rents._
|
| That's abominable. Does that really happen?
| riotnrrd wrote:
| Those suburbanites were probably doing some variation of
| coppicing their trees, to keep them stunted and bushy for
| aesthetics.
|
| I lived in San Francisco, too, and helped to plant dozens of
| trees with FUF (https://www.fuf.net/). You can't just randomly
| plant a tree along a sidewalk; some trees do badly in cities,
| attract pests, or drop inedible fruit that attracts vermin.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| I guess I'm surprised that Finland & Sweden lost so much tree
| cover. Is that due to Ikea?
| drivers99 wrote:
| If you zoom in you see a patchwork of blue and pink, so it
| seems like just cycling through different areas for cutting and
| regrowth.
| abbe98 wrote:
| The vast majority of Swedish and Finish forests are managed for
| logging. All of the tree cover loss on this map in my
| area(except for some very recent that has just been
| logged/replanted) is today young forest which will be logged
| again in a few decades...
| smcl wrote:
| So just to add some extra regional colour to this, it's not _all_
| down to deforestation for the purposes of farming or logging[0].
| There 's some pretty gruesome losses in the South Bohemia region
| of Czech Republic (around Telc and Dacice) which have an
| interesting backstory. Trying to recall an information board I
| read, so it may be a little bit spotty. But there was a big
| movement about planting spruce forests last century, which has
| now turned out to be a fairly vulnerable tree to a particular
| bark beetle (referred to as "kurovec" iirc) and ultimately wasn't
| very suitable in many of the areas it was planted anyway as
| tended to die and rot in the warmer climate of South Bohemia.
| This means that vast swathes of forest that previously appeared
| to be ok are now under threat and basically need to be felled.
|
| So what you see when you go through there are pretty substantial
| areas of felled trees. We went a few years in a row to somewhere
| near a little village called "Zvule") and the difference was
| shocking for the years 2019 and 2020. If you look both sides of
| the road here you get an idea of what I mean -
| https://www.google.com/maps/@49.0877897,15.2336907,3a,90y,61...
| Notice that basically all of the remaining trees have been
| marked, so they'll have been felled too.
|
| [0] - I'm sure in this case they put the wood to good use, but I
| think they would have preferred to keep the forest as-is
|
| edit: found the area I'm talking about on the map:
| https://www.globalforestwatch.org/map/?map=eyJjZW50ZXIiOnsib...
|
| I imagine much of the green remaining there is just waiting for
| someone to come cut it down.
| lmilcin wrote:
| I looked at the data from some places I knew very well for over 3
| decades (like around where I grew up and are still visiting
| parents regularly) and it looks noisy and mostly incorrect,
| nothing like real tree cover change.
| Rexxar wrote:
| I have have big doubts on the methodology used to generate this
| maps. The map seems completely wrong for France, there is a big
| red mark on the biggest forest of France (Landes) but I can
| assure you that the forest is still there and will be there for a
| long time.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| Part of my job involves satellite imagery (when I can get it),
| and I have occasion to compare the current year with imagery
| from, say, 2018 or so. It's a little depressing at times.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| Some property I bought after it was clear cut around 2003 shows
| up on this map quite clearly ... including the increase in cover
| in the time since. So looks accurate for my single data point.
| hirundo wrote:
| How is this reconciled with the NASA 2016 report that the "Change
| in Leaf Area" was largely positive from 1982-2015?
|
| https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2436/co2-is-making-earth-green...
| tomrod wrote:
| That pink/blue distinction is really hard to visually nail down.
| Is the Southeast US gaining or losing coverage?
| pwr-electronics wrote:
| Click a place name > "analyze" pop-up button > bottom analysis
| tab.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I know it's not really difficult, but just reading it spelled
| out like that makes it sound very non-intuitively difficult.
| Tech writing is hard!
| [deleted]
| derbOac wrote:
| You can decrease the opacity of the purple/loss. It seems like
| a lot of the loss areas is the same areas where there's gain.
| It would be nice if there was some estimate of "unreplaced
| loss" or "predicted net loss"; the purple on top of the blue is
| visually difficult to discriminate.
| greenie_beans wrote:
| i zoomed into some land that i'm intimately familiar with in
| mississippi. it got the tree loss right (when some logging took
| place), but doesn't show the later reforesting.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Looking in the area of the map East Texas and eastward toward
| the east coast, there is a definite blue tinge showing
| indicating gains in that area. Using the slider to narrow the
| range makes it even more clear.
|
| I wonder if this is gains from natural regrowth or
| reforestation efforts like you describe. I was pleasantly
| surprised to see any positive direction on the map as I have
| a seeminly pessimistic view on the situation.
| colonelxc wrote:
| It has a tooltip on the loss section that mentions that the
| young trees need to get big enough to 'achieve canopy
| closure'
| roter wrote:
| It helps if you remove the Green layer and zoom in (otherwise
| it just looks purple).
| chroma wrote:
| There's no way to compare them because the data sets are for
| different time periods. The losses are for 2001-2020 but the
| gains are only for 2001-2012.
|
| I don't know about specific regions, but forests worldwide are
| doing fine. In 1990, the world had 4.13 billion hectares of
| forest. In 2017 that number was 4 billion hectares.[1] That's
| not bad considering world population increased 40% in that
| time.
|
| 1. https://ourworldindata.org/forest-area#primary-vs-planted-
| fo...
| emn13 wrote:
| I'd be careful drawing too many conclusions from that
| dataset. Many if not most forests are managed and logged; not
| all of that logging is necessarily on the public books nor
| does it imply complete deforestation; Legal logging typically
| requires a certain amount of regrowth to satisfy regulations
| (whether national or to satisfy carbon offsets). However, a
| sapling is not equivalent to a centuries old giant. Some
| afforestation targets permit a very, very low tree cover to
| be considered wooded. And if trees are being replanted; how
| is biodiversity doing? People have a tendency to pick cheap
| solutions (which is perfectly reasonable!), but that also
| means we should be careful we don't misinterpret simplistic
| coverage metrics as saying more than they do.
|
| I looked (quickly, and therefore poorly, I'm sure), but I
| couldn't see anything in the ourworldindata sources that
| tries to distinguish the quality of forest left. I'm likely
| missing something, admittedly; I'll keep looking, if I find a
| link to their methodology I'll post an update.
|
| They seem to be gather data from the UN FAO forestry project,
| and also other sources. I still haven't found any in those
| sources that account for the size of the trees; but
| ourworldindata does indirectly include some evidence that
| size may have reduced - the UN FAO source estimates forest
| coverage has dropped by almost exactly a third; but the tree
| number (where tree is defined as being 10cm in diamater at
| breast height) has fallen by almost half. However, since the
| sources use wildly different methodologies, I'm sure there
| might be other causes for the discrepancy, but in any case -
| it still highlights that interpreting these numbers isn't
| entirely trivial.
|
| (Incidently, the same caveats likely hold for the
| globalforestwatch.org site; there too it's not obvious what
| they're actually measuring, nor how well they can do that,
| nor how close whatever metric they've got aligns with
| whatever you actually care about.)
| loganbyers wrote:
| I agree context and intricacies are everything. On your
| point about GFW, I know the team is very conscious and
| attentive to communicating what the data means.
|
| This link might be helpful:
| https://www.globalforestwatch.org/help/map/faqs/
| loganbyers wrote:
| I don't have the ability to give a highly researched and
| informed response to this currently, but I disagree with the
| claim that 'forests worldwide are doing fine'. I don't think
| you can make a well-educated argument from looking at global
| aggregated numbers of land classification for a ~25 year time
| period. Biodiversity, ecosystem connectivity, indigenous
| rights, agricultural competition, surface water quality, and
| legal regulations are all important framings to consider as
| well. Also, while 1990 is a while ago in human terms, it is
| hyper recent if you think about the destruction of forests
| over the past 12-thousand years of human-induced landscape
| disturbance.
|
| I agree that limiting forest loss has been one of the more
| prominent victories in the environmental space, along with
| halting ozone depletion. Happy to pat some colleagues on the
| back for that success...
|
| Dropping this resource from WRI:
| https://research.wri.org/gfr/global-forest-review
| destitude wrote:
| Will there be later years of data incorporated? The tree cover
| gain appears to only go to 2012 whereas the loss goes to 2020
| which would underrepresent any gains.
| loganbyers wrote:
| Cool to see this on HN - this is a product from the World
| Resources Institute[0] (my employer). I can potentially relay
| some knowledge from that team or try to direct someone here for
| questions and comments. The important thing to know for these
| maps is that Tree Cover Loss is not directly "deforestation". On
| a pixel by pixel basis (each covering ~30m x 30m) tree loss can
| occur without the major ecosystem destruction of deforestation.
| This is still measureable. That is why the visualization of tree
| cover loss is parameterized by percentage for greater inspection
| and nuance.
|
| I will take this opportunity to point out the joy and
| satisfaction that comes along with making these kind of data for
| impact products. We get to work on globally critical problems,
| making real measured impact, solving interesting technical
| problems, and developing features and tools for real and
| appreciative users across the world. We have dedicated and
| talented staff (product and engineering teams, in addition to
| tons of researchers and engagement staff) who are passionate
| about their work and our collective mission. It's a great
| environment to work in each and every day. There are always
| challenges - project/institutional revenue is driven mainly by
| grants, our salary can not compete with the cash+equity offers of
| big SV tech companies and VC backed startups. But when I wake up
| in the morning and come to work (we are a very distributed/remote
| organization) I know that the time and effort I spend is directed
| towards a global good and I can easily say the same for almost
| all of my colleagues. That is invaluable.
|
| If this kind of work interests you feel free to reach out to me
| (email in profile). We frequently have job openings[1] for PMs,
| SWEs, and many technical roles.
|
| Edit: Senior Software Engineer position currently open (and would
| be working on Global Forest Watch) [2].
|
| [0] https://wri.org
|
| [1] https://jobs.jobvite.com/wri
|
| [2] https://jobs.jobvite.com/wri/job/oeglifwR
| matallo wrote:
| I immediately recognized the title of the HN post, and it
| always makes my day when I see GFW in the wild.
|
| Thanks so much for your comment, as someone whose name appears
| in the list of contributors [0] and was in the presentation of
| the project when it first launched 8 years ago I feel very
| grateful being part of it and couldn't have expressed the work
| better.
|
| [0] https://github.com/Vizzuality/gfw
| austinwm wrote:
| Thank you for your work at Data Lab! I've been following WRI
| and GFW for a while and it's important stuff.
|
| Also working in a global public-good project [0] I strongly
| resemble your challenges - uncertain funding, difficulty
| competing for top tech talent, and relatively small teams for
| huge projects. But so much more importantly the amazing
| benefits of working on something meaningful resonate with me.
| The outsized positive impact each of my team members can make
| on the world is a pleasure to be a part of every day, despite
| the challenges.
|
| Keep up the good work!
|
| [0] https://dhis2.org
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