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A: This was chosen together with our executive partners in Indonesia and Gabon as a workable scale. This means that it is not too large so that it cannot be easily covered in the field and not be too small so that there would be way too many predictions
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Why was six months in the future chosen as the timeline?
A: This was chosen together with our executive partners in Indonesia and Gabon as a workable timeframe. Not too far in the future to be too vague to handle on, but not too short-term to not be able to make preparations for an intervention. We do produce preprocessed ground-truth data for one, three and twelve months as well for anyone who wants to build a model on those timeframes by using the open source path.
Q: How often are the predictions updated?
A: We make the predictions every month, in the first week of the month. So every month we make predictions for the next six months.
Q: Why is Forest Foresight only covering the region between 30° North and 30° South?
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A: Given the work that goes into preparing a field intervention by our partners we have found that it is more important to be very sure about where deforestation will take place than to cover everything. Experience has taught us that most implementing partners do not have the resources to tackle the majority of the predicted forest loss
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Why do you say you prevent deforestation when it is actually forest degradation?
A: The two major reasons are that deforestation is a term well known to the general public. The second one is that it is really hard to prove with a Predictive Warning System based on an Early Warning System whether forest loss is permanent and whether the spatial scale means that it is complete or only part removal.
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A: An Early Warning System is used as a general term in two instances: to alert before an event happens or to alert as soon as possible when an event has happened. Though the term Early Warning System is used way more often than our Predictive Warning System we have experienced that the term is mostly used to describe the latter (report as soon as possible after the fact). By changing the name of our System we want to differentiate ourselves from that.
Technical Questions
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What hardware specifications are required to run the Forest Foresight package?
A: Since we use R we almost never have memory issues. Regardless we would advise to have at least 16GB of RAM to process an average-sized country (32-64GB for a country like Brazil). No GPU acceleration is used so not important. Any moderately sized CPU will do (i5-i7). Storage depends on the area size but for an average-sized country you need about 2GB of storage space. Note that this is only required for training, for predicting using an existing model you can use almost any computer.
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A: We find it more important that the user has full control over the scripts to make it their own than to give the easiest experience possible. For non-technical people we provide the pre-made predictions monthly that can be downloaded with a GUI. Do note that it requires very little scripting skills to get started with building and running a model, as explained here.
Q: Do you need to have scripting skills to add new features?
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