Forest Watch: Real-Time Deforestation Monitoring Dashboard

Forest cover loss is easy to miss when you're only checking in every few months - by the time a review cycle catches it, the damage is already done. We built Forest Watch to close that gap: a web dashboard that ingests satellite and remote-sensing data on an ongoing basis, compares it against historical baselines, and surfaces areas of change as soon as they appear, instead of waiting for a scheduled audit.

The dashboard is built around a straightforward loop: pull new imagery, run change detection against the stored baseline, store the results in a spatial database, and render the output as an interactive map with time-based filtering. Analysts can scrub through change history for any region, drill into a flagged area, and export findings without needing a desktop GIS application open.

The goal throughout was accessibility - environmental monitoring teams shouldn't need specialized GIS software just to check whether a protected area is being cleared. If it runs in a browser and updates itself, more people actually use it.

We designed and built a Python-based ingestion pipeline that pulls satellite imagery on a recurring basis, runs automated change detection against a stored historical baseline, and writes the results into a PostGIS-backed spatial database. A lightweight web dashboard (Python, HTML/CSS) sits on top, rendering flagged regions on an interactive map with time-based filtering so analysts can see exactly when and where change occurred.