In close partnership with Google, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation seeks to help deploy an accessible platform for distributing critical data, information, and analysis tools to the global community, in order to monitor and improve how we manage the Earth’s environment. At the International Climate Change Conference (COP15) in Copenhagen, Google.org’s Rebecca Moore and Dr. Amy Luers unveiled this innovative technology. Read their blog entry here: http://blog.google.org/2009/12/seeing-forest-through-cloud.html.

This prototype technology is enabling the online and collaborative use of robust, science-based algorithms for monitoring changes in the earth’s forests at a global scale. A grant from the Foundation to the Woods Hole Research Center supports work to produce spatially consistent pan-tropical data sets to help monitor forest cover and associated carbon stocks stored in above-ground forest biomass. A series of grants to the Carnegie Institution for Science have broadened accessibility to remote sensing methods and enabled tropical nations, NGOs, and other stakeholders to determine baseline forest conditions and build capacity for forest monitoring across the Andes Amazon region. A grant to Imazon supports advanced, transparent, independent forest monitoring technology and a reporting system to inform governance in the Brazilian Amazon. As Luis Solorzano, the Foundation’s program director for environmental science explained, “this is a partnership based on a shared commitment to collaborating across sectors, and to empowering global society’s ability for multi-scale, global environmental problem-solving. It is our hope that this platform will open spaces for the collaborative, resourceful creation of knowledge, driven by the particular demands from communities, governments, and civil society.”