• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, December 11, 2009

At the International Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen Thursday, Google engineers introduced a technology aimed at monitoring environmental changes in forests worldwide. The hope is that the prototype can curb global warming. The technology is intended to help stop the destruction and disappearance of the forests by keeping a close eye on emissions from tropical deforestation.

The project combines satellite imagery from Google Earth to identify where deforestation is occurring, with computational analysis supported by cloud computing to compare images over time.

"The more deforestation you have, the more soil loss you have," says Mike Hill, assistant district manager at the Freehold soil conservation district in New Jersey. "It takes more than 100 years for the earth to make an inch of soil. It takes deforested land mass a couple rainstorms to lose that topsoil created under a forest. It's one of the quickest ways to have a double dip in a problem. You not only lose the good soil to grow the trees again, but you also lose their ability to sequester CO2, which is what we're producing."

Hill says cloud computing reduces the carbon footprint by not having server farms at everyone's location, but only one location. Theoretically, he says, cloud computing reduced CO2 output.

Google's project supports the United Nations efforts, which introduced the framework called Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries. The program provides financial incentives to rainforest nations to protect forests. In a blog post, both Google.org Engineering Manager Rebecca Moore, and Environment Manager Amy Luers write that in order to participate, each nation will need to keep a running report of the state of their forest. But to do this they need technology.

To develop the technology, which Google calls a "prototype," the search engine partnered with Greg Asner of Carnegie Institution for Science, and Carlos Souza of Imazon. The computational resources, or processing power, come from Google's cloud computing platforms.

Asner and Souza say that combining science with massive data and technology resources offers several advantages that include speed, lower costs, security and privacy and monitoring the impact of climate change on forests.

Today, the technology developed by Asner and Souza is used in Latin America to track changes in forest cover. Development has been slow due to the lack of high-quality satellite images and the computer power needed for analysis.

The combined prototype is not available to the general public. It is only available to a small number of organizations for testing.