Forest change mapped by Google Earth  

The BBC has an article on research by the University of Maryland into deforestation - Forest change mapped by Google Earth.

A new high-resolution global map of forest loss and gain has been created with the help of Google Earth. The interactive online tool is publicly available and zooms in to a remarkably high level of local detail - a resolution of 30m. It charts the story of the world's tree canopies from 2000 to 2012, based on 650,000 satellite images by Landsat 7.

In that time, the Earth lost a combined "forest" the size of Mongolia, enough trees to cover the UK six times. Brazil's progress in reducing deforestation was more than offset by losses in Indonesia, Malaysia, Paraguay and Angola, according to a study in the journal Science.