Nusantara Atlas is for anyone interested in monitoring deforestation, fires, peatlands degradation and forest regeneration in Equatorial Asia.

This platform tracks the actions of palm oil, pulp-and-paper, mining and timber producers, the main drivers of deforestation, to ensure what happens on the ground is fair, transparent, and democratic.

It brings satellite images (Planet/NICFI, Sentinel-2, Landsat, NOAA-20, S-NPP, Aqua and Terra), near-real-time deforestation alerts (RADD ; GLAD), fire hotspots (VIIRS and MODIS) and rich cadastral information in one space.

It features stories and reports of deforestation and fires for civil society and journalists who conduct analyses of the companies involved, submit findings to the relevant authorities, and inform the public.

It geo-references conservation stories from news outlets to specific locations for richer contextual information.

It tracks deforestation annually over two decades, to calculate the past deforestation footprint of companies and creates the clearest picture of the relationship between the loss of natural forests (deforestation) and the development of plantations by linking maps of plantations expansion and associated forest conversion with updated concession maps of land ownership.

You can generate time lapse satellite animations on the fly anywhere in the world using Planet/NICFI, Sentinel-2, Landsat and save the results as an animated gif file.

You can visualize and analyze temporal trends in deforestation and fires anywhere in Indonesia, Malaysian Borneo and Brunei down to municipalities, verify no deforestation pledges in concessions, near palm oil mills, or verify the performance of protected areas, a village forest, or a restoration project.

The atlas also tracks fire hotspots daily the expansion of roads and their impacts on forests. It tracks deforestation near palm oil mills to improve the traceability of palm oil products, in protected areas to monitor conservation outcomes, and in jurisdictions to monitor the effectiveness of government policies to reduce deforestation. It brings all this information at users’ fingertips via a dynamic graphical user interface and provides an easy way to identify companies and subsidiaries that keep clearing forests.

All the satellite-based maps and analyses developed in the Atlas are published in these peer-reviewed journals:

Annual Deforestation:

Hansen M, Potapov P, Moore R, Hancher M, Turubanova S, Tyukavina A, et al. High-resolution global maps of 21st-century forest cover change. science. 2013;342(6160):850-3.

Margono BA, Turubanova S, Zhuravleva I, Potapov P, Tyukavina A, Baccini A, et al. Mapping and monitoring deforestation and forest degradation in Sumatra (Indonesia) using Landsat time series data sets from 1990 to 2010. Environmental Research Letters. 2012;7(3):034010.

Annual expansion of oil palm and pulpwood plantations, and associated forest conversion:

Gaveau D.L.A, Locatelli B, Salim MA, Manurung T, Descals A, Angelsen A, et al. Slowing deforestation in Indonesia follows declining oil palm expansion and lower oil prices. Plos One. 2022.17(3): e0266178. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0266178

Gaveau, D.L.A, Santos, L., Locatelli, B., Salim, M.A., Husnayaen, H., Meijaard, E., Heatubun, C., Sheil, D., 2021. Forest loss in Indonesian New Guinea (2001–2019): Trends, drivers and outlook. Biological Conservation 261, 109225. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2021.109225

Deforestation alerts (GLAD and RADD):

Hansen MC, Krylov A, Tyukavina A, Potapov PV, Turubanova S, Zutta B, et al. Humid tropical forest disturbance alerts using Landsat data. Environmental Research Letters. 2016;11(3):034008.

Reiche J, Mullissa A, Slagter B, Gou Y, Tsendbazar N-E, Odongo-Braun C, et al. Forest disturbance alerts for the Congo Basin using Sentinel-1. Environmental Research Letters. 2021;16(2):024005

Fire hotspots:

Schroeder W, Oliva P, Giglio L, Csiszar IA. The New VIIRS 375 m active fire detection data product: Algorithm description and initial assessment. Remote Sensing of Environment. 2014;143:85-96.

Justice C, Giglio L, Korontzi S, Owens J, Morisette J, Roy D, et al. The MODIS fire products. Remote sensing of Environment. 2002;83(1-2):244-62.