Places to Watch Palm and Soy: Identifying High Priority Forest Disturbances Related to Palm in Southeast Asia and Soy in South America Using GLAD Alerts
Places to Watch Palm and Soy (PTWPS) provides a method to filter thousands of deforestation alerts from the Global Land Analysis and Discovery (GLAD) laboratory at the University of Maryland, prioritizing clusters of deforestation alerts that are especially alarming. PTWPS is a descendant of the quarterly, global Places to Watch (PTW) analysis, which provides inputs for curated stories about emerging deforestation. For PTWPS, these alerts are related to current palm and soy plantation areas that are likely to be in noncompliance with zero deforestation commitments made by large companies if planted with oil palm in Southeast Asia, specifically Indonesia and Malaysia, and if planted with soy in various countries in South America. In particular, the PTWPS method picks up large clearance events most likely caused by industrial palm concessions or large soy farms. The analysis is an automated process that is executed once a month with the curated results displayed as a layer on the Global Forest Watch flagship platform. The main differences between PTWPS and PTW is that PTWPS focuses only on potential oil palm expansion in Southeast Asia and potential soy expansion in South America rather than on any deforestation in the entire tropics. The sheer number of deforestation alerts produced weekly makes it difficult for most journalists and the media to find new clearing events of enough consequence to report to the public, and this method aims to elucidate those areas. This methodology is focused on clearing events geographically associated with agricultural commodity production but does not attempt to resolve direct attribution through geospatial analysis or other means.
