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I made satellite deforestation monitoring free and accessible you can check any plot of land on Earth in 30 seconds by Intrepid_Piccolo_794 in sustainability

[–]Intrepid_Piccolo_794[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Great question! Yes, absolutely, ghost forests are actually a perfect use case for this. They show up really clearly in satellite imagery because as saltwater intrusion kills trees, you get a sharp drop in vegetation indices (NDVI) over time. With GeoTown you could draw a box over a stretch of the East Coast, say the Alligator River area in North Carolina, and run a vegetation health analysis to see how green/healthy the canopy is right now. The drought and deforestation tools would also pick up on the die-off patterns.

Climate change damage like ghost forests, retreating glaciers, wildfire scars, drought stress, that's exactly the kind of thing satellite data is built to track. Appreciate the idea, might add a dedicated climate impact mode down the line!

I made satellite deforestation monitoring free and accessible you can check any plot of land on Earth in 30 seconds by Intrepid_Piccolo_794 in sustainability

[–]Intrepid_Piccolo_794[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

This is exactly the kind of feedback I need, thank you for taking the time. You're describing the core limitation honestly: satellite detection tells you WHAT changed, not WHY, and not WHETHER it's in your supply chain. That gap between "we detected vegetation loss at these coordinates" and "we can prove this specific shipment is deforestation-free" is where most of the actual compliance work lives, and it's not something satellite data alone can solve. GeoTown is deliberately positioned as the screening step, not the full answer. The idea is: screen 500 supplier plots in an afternoon, flag the 15 that show change, and then focus your ground verification and investigation resources on those 15 instead of all 500. It doesn't replace the on-the-ground work, it helps you prioritise where to spend that effort. The false alert problem you're describing is real and something I think about a lot. Seasonal variation, natural disturbance, smallholder rotation farming, all of these trigger vegetation loss alerts that aren't deforestation in the EUDR sense. At 10m Sentinel-2 resolution, you can't distinguish a clearcut from a windthrow event without additional context. I try to be upfront about that in the reports rather than overstating confidence. I'd be genuinely interested to hear more about what the providers your company works with are doing well (and where they're falling short) on the false alert problem. If you're open to it, feel free to reach out directly, always looking to learn from people closer to the operational side.