“Where are ecosystems still left standing? Where should conservation be focused?

A new tool is attempting to answer these questions and serve as a watchdog for conservation and land protection initiatives around the world. Global Safety Net v3 (GSN3) is a geospatial data platform that uses satellite imagery, artificial intelligence, and mapping techniques to understand the extent of landscapes around the world, and how they’re faring…

Karl Burkart: For GSN3, we actually started from scratch and went down to a 90-meter [300-ft] resolution, which is essentially 100 times more accurate and higher resolution than the original version. That was in partnership with the science team at The Nature Conservancy, who had looked at the history of human modification and used that as a proxy to deductively remove areas that we are pretty sure have been converted to human use.

On a satellite image, sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference. But by going underneath the canopy and looking at the chronology of roads, mining, urban development, and agricultural development and expansion, you’re able to put a picture together from the other way down. So we were looking at the ecology from up; they’re looking at human history. We met in the middle.

It’s a novel method, and it’s higher resolution and much more accurate. What it does is it attempts to estimate this in a consistent way globally. It is very hard to do, but we need to do that for the biodiversity convention. So it creates that estimate of an area that’s very likely to be important for biodiversity and ecosystem services.”

From Mongabay.