An international team has trained a Siamese Attention U-Net model on Google Earth imagery to spot forest-cover changes automatically—no massive hand-labelled datasets required. The study finds the planet lost 100 million ha of forest between 2000-2022, and the new pipeline can flag the high-risk zones that need urgent protection. New Zealand’s own University of Otago is among the collaborators, putting Kiwi researchers at the centre of this low-cost, scalable tech that could soon monitor Aotearoa’s native forests and carbon stocks in near-real time.
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