We have prepared a Rainforest Toolkit that can be useful in your reporting and investigations.
The information is sorted by themes of interest.
One general super tool:
OpenRefine is helpful for working with messy data: cleaning it, transforming it from one format into another, and extending it with web services and external data. It’s available in 15 languages.
- Geolocation:
- A truck driver told you that he is going to get soybeans in a field 30 minutes away? With this tool, we have a rough idea of where they could be: app.traveltime.com.
- Global Forest Watch will help you explore interactive charts and maps that summarize key statistics about global forests.
- Digital Globe provides high-quality satellite images.
- Maphub provides analysis of satellite images and logging roads.
- Satellites.pro often has better imagery than Google Earth with no sign-in needed.
- Flightradar24 allows you to track planes.
- Marine Traffic allows you to track ships in real time.
- [Africa] Digital Earth Africa offers quality satellite imagery from Africa.
- [Africa] The Congo Basin Atlas Forestier contains a list of all forest concessions, the names of the companies, and the capital behind these concessions and companies.
- [Africa] Forest Link Community Alert Map collects community-led alerts of illegal logging, mining, and other destructive activities.
- DOPA Explorer offers you a user-friendly catalog of internationally protected areas.
- [Brazil] TerraBrasilis provides many maps that show the Brazilian territory in-depth.
- [Mekong] Mekong Dam Monitor monitors dams and environmental impacts in the Mekong Basin.
- Google Earth Engine can quickly process vast amounts of satellite image data.
- Keep your findings:
- Archive every page you find something useful on. It doesn't matter if it's a tiny snippet of info. When you need to cite it and find it has been deleted, you've lost a lead: archive.org/web/.
- Social Media:
- Birdhunt.co is an easy way to find tweets around a location of interest.
- Do you have a photograph as your lead?:
- Geolocation Estimation is a deep learning tool trained on geotagged images.
- Calculator.ipvm.com is great when it comes to image forensics. With it, you can obtain information on the image based on camera characteristics, or the inverse.
- PimEyes is a powerful face recognition tool.
- Track fires, gas, timber, and more:
- FIRMS is a great tool for tracking heat signatures, normally fires.
- SkyTruth Flaring Map database produces near real-time maps of gas flaring around the globe.
- Timber Trade Portal allows you to track forestry sectors, legal frameworks, trade flow, and major companies.
- Business:
- The UN Comtrade Database has free access to detailed global trade data.
- Sedar will help you search for company and investment fund documents.
- oec.world allows you to visualize, understand, and interact with the latest international trade data.
- Land Matrix is for people interested in land deals.
- OCCRP Aleph is for investigations about corruption.
- Sayari is for connecting business dots.
- OpenCorporates is the largest open database of companies in the world.
- Panjiva is a platform that’s bringing transparency to global trade.
- OpenSanctions helps journalists find persons of interest.
- Global environment climate tracker has analysis and dashboards for different types of international environmental crimes.
- TRAFFIC’s learning center provides tools and online courses to help understand illegal wildlife trade.
- worldtradestats.com should be able to offer any country’s import and export data.
- A document for people interested in tracing Chinese business.
- SEC can help with a company's data, transactions and more.
Last observations:
- Forest Trend publishes information on trade.
- Chatham House monitors forest governance and legality performance globally.
- Preferred by Nature publishes reports on risk assessments and tools to mitigate risks and details how illegal logging and timber trade take place in certain countries.
- Neo4j helps reporters see connections at a glance by clicking on the node icons.
- The Environmental Justice Atlas includes a rapidly growing catalog of community impacts and environmental conflict hotspots around the world.
- #WildEye allows you to track environmental crime across many rainforest regions.
- The New York Times prepared some training material for anyone interested in data journalism.
- Further tools can be accessed in the amazing toolkit prepared by GIJN.
If you have questions or would like to recommend unlisted tools that facilitate reporting, please feel free to contact Fernanda at [email protected]