Global Forest Watch

Global Forest Watch (GFW), run by the World Resources Institute, is the closest thing to a real-time dashboard for the world’s forests. It combines satellite data from GLAD (University of Maryland) with national forest statistics, concession maps, and user-submitted reports. For India, GFW is most useful for tracking forest loss alerts — you can subscribe to near-real-time notifications for a specific district, protected area, or watershed, and receive an alert when tree cover loss is detected. This makes it a powerful accountability tool: researchers, journalists, and activists can independently verify deforestation claims rather than relying solely on government FSI biennial reports. The data is free, open, and accessible through both the web platform and an API.