Artificial intelligence can help fight deforestation in Congo
By Umberto Bacchi (Thomson Reuters Foundation) | 28 July 2017 LONDON – A new technique using artificial intelligence to predict where deforestation is most likely to occur could help the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) preserve its shrinking rainforest and cut carbon emissions, researchers have said. Congo’s rainforest, the world’s second-largest after the Amazon, is under pressure from farms, mines, logging and infrastructure development, scientists say. Protecting forests is widely seen as one of the cheapest and most effective ways to reduce the emissions driving global warming. But conservation efforts in DRC have suffered from a lack of precise data on which areas of the country’s vast territory are most at risk of losing their pristine vegetation, said Thomas Maschler, a researcher at the World Resources Institute (WRI). “We don’t have fine-grain information on what is actually happening on the ground,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. To address the problem Maschler and other scientists at the Washington-based WRI used a computer algorithm based on machine learning, a type of artificial intelligence. The computer was fed inputs, including satellite derived data, detailing how the landscape in a number of regions, accounting for almost a fifth of the country, had changed…
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