Forest Monitoring with CLASLite, Imazon, and Google Earth

From the ScienceDaily article "Breakthrough in Monitoring Tropical Deforestation Announced in Copenhagen":

New technology, developed by a team of scientists at Carnegie's Department of Global Ecology, is revolutionizing forest monitoring by marrying free satellite imagery and powerful analytical methods in an easy-to-use, desktop software package called CLASlite.

Thus far, 70 government, non-government, and academic organizations in five countries have adopted the technology, with more on the horizon.

At mongabay.com, Rhett Butler writes:

In what could be a critical development in helping tropical countries monitor deforestation, Google has unveiled a partnership with scientists using advanced remote sensing technology to rapidly analyze and map forest cover in extremely high resolution. The effort could help countries detect deforestation shortly after it occurs making it easier to prevent further forest clearing.

Two institutions have developed technologies that come a long way towards making this tool a reality: the Carnegie Institute for Science's CLASlite system (led by Greg Asner), which uses satellite imagery and laser deployed from airplanes (airborne Light Detection and Ranging - LiDAR) to build high-resolution, 3-D maps of forests that can measure logging and other disturbance; and Imazon's Sistema de Alerta de Deforestation (SAD) (led by Carlos Souza), which uses satellite imagery to rapidly detect and report deforestation. Now through a prototype project, Google brings the power of these technologies online, harnessing its massive computing cloud.

Rebecca Moore and Amy Luers on "Seeing the forest through the cloud," at the Official Google Blog:

What if we could offer scientists and tropical nations access to a high-performance satellite imagery-processing engine running online, in the “Google cloud”? And what if we could gather together all of the earth’s raw satellite imagery data — petabytes of historical, present and future data — and make it easily available on this platform? We decided to find out, by working with Greg and Carlos to re-implement their software online, on top of a prototype platform we've built that gives them easy access to terabytes of satellite imagery and thousands of computers in our data centers. ...

As a Google.org product, this technology will be provided to the world as a not-for-profit service. This technology prototype is currently available to a small set of partners for testing purposes — it's not yet available to the general public but we expect to make it more broadly available over the next year.