The space tech helping to tackle deforestation Shooting laser beams at trees to tackle deforestation

Image source, FAO

"You can't manage what you don't know," said Nzigiyimpu.

New technology is needed to improve the situation of forests.

There are five protected forest areas in the small central African country of Bure.

Over the past 20 years, he and his team have worked with local communities to protect and manage the forest. His face lit up when he described the smell and beauty of the area. He says it is pure nature.

Monitoring the impact of human actions and economies, tracking the impact of climate change, plus staff numbers and budgets are some of the factors that Mr. Nzigiyimpa has to consider in carrying out his work.

The Integrated Management Effectiveness Tool is a free piece of software that helps him track and record all of this.

The tool was developed for the purpose of environmental work. The European Union as well as the Organisation of African, Caribbean and Pacific States support this.

"We use this kind of tool to train the managers of the site to use it to collect good data, and to analyse this data, in order to take good decisions."

Tracking and protecting the world's forests is important for everyone. Climate change is caused by the deforestation of forests.

According to the United Nations, 25 million acres of the world's forests are lost annually.

The UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration was launched last year to restore forests and other natural habitats. This has resulted in countries, companies and other organizations promising to stop and reverse the degradation of the environment.

"Just saying that we're going to restore isn't enough," says Yelena Finegold, an officer at the Food and Agricultural Organization. Responsible planning of how that restoration is going to happen, followed by actions on the ground enabled by investments in restoration, and monitoring systems in place to track that restoration are needed.

New digital tools have been created to gather, sort and use data better.

The Framework for Ecosystem Monitoring is a website belonging to the Food and Agriculture Organization. Satellite imagery is used to highlight forest changes around the world. The maps and data can be accessed by any internet user.

The US space agency Nasa is one of the main data sources for Ferm. The acronym Gedi is similar to the word Jedi from the Star Wars movies. Its slogan is "may the forest be with you".

The tech is very realistic. Laura Duncanson, who helps to lead the Gedi project from the University of Maryland's Department of Geographical Sciences, says that they shoot lasers at trees from the International Space Station.

Dr Duncanson says that they use reflected energy to map forests in 3D, including their height, canopy density, and carbon content. For a long time, we have been able to observe forest loss from space, but now with Gedi, we can assign the carbon emissions associated with forest loss for greater accuracy.

Planet Labs, a Norwegian business, provides maps and data to Ferm. 350 million photos of Earth's surface are taken on a daily basis.

Governments and businesses can hire Planet Labs. In addition to monitoring forests, it can be used to check everything from agriculture to energy and infrastructure projects.

"All the available imagery from space has greatly changed the way we monitor forests, because it has produced extremely repeatable observations and extremely frequent revisits of places", said D'Annunzio.

With all the publicly available satellites, we can get a full snapshot of the Earth every few days.

There are pilot schemes in Vietnam and Laos that are trying to tackle illegal logging. Rangers and community workers on the ground get notifications on their mobile phones when there's new destruction.

"Now, what we're really trying to do is not just understand the volume of forests being lost, but where is it specifically being lost in this district or that, so that we can monitor loss, and even prevent it in near real-time, from getting worse," said the