FLEGT Watch

FLEGT Watch is a deforestation-monitoring service developed by VisioTerra for independent forest observers in Central and West Africa. It was built in 2018 to user specifications from CIDT and Tropenbos International, is funded by the European Union, CIDT and Tropenbos International, and has been operational since 1 January 2019.

Because the forests it watches lie in cloud-prone tropical regions, FLEGT Watch relies mainly on Sentinel-1 radar imagery. Each new radar acquisition is compared with the four previous ones, taking topography, meteorological data and recent rainfall into account, and an algorithm flags significant forest-cover changes with a three-level confidence index. VisioTerra states that events are reported in near real time, as soon as the space agencies release the Sentinel data. Sentinel-2 optical imagery acquired before and after an event is used to help confirm it.

The FLEGT Watch Web application alerts the community of observers attached to each monitored area, who can review and comment on events. The FLEGT Watch App, an Android smartphone application, lets observers plan a field mission to a detected event, download maps and images for use without an internet connection, collect geotagged photos, videos and interviews, share them with the community and generate mission reports automatically. VisioTerra trains users on site in radar photo-interpretation and maintains a photo-interpretation atlas. The provider reports 186 monitored areas covering about 45 million hectares in Ghana, Côte d'Ivoire, Liberia, Cameroon, Gabon and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.