imnotanerd

You are looking at the forest cover lost in Suriname only for that time period.

The bot gathers global forest cover loss for a given day and compares the aggregated of every country against the selected country from the list.

I thought I made it already pretty clear on the way the statuses are written, how would you write them to make it clear that its global area compared to that country rather as that country area only?

I didn't take it as jab!

I actually appreciate that you put in effort to add to the discussion and I presume you made some research to find the Hansen 1982-2016 research paper.

That is a success to me because my work has achieved it's goal, discussion about deforestation is moving forwards! It's even more exciting that this is coming from someone who is not a close-minded environmentalist. In a way I agree that, despite taking care of our environment should be a priority, doctrine-like following of mantras and lack of proper criticism is actually harmful for any movement and individual.

When I started this project I also had that feeling that we were running out of trees.

But my motivation never was to alarm people that we were running out of them, my intention was to make actual deforestation data accessible and approachable to the public so they could decide how big of a problem this was. I have myself learned that I should probably worry less about it than I used to thanks to this bot, and that's fine.

I also think you are not seeing the big picture here. 30 years is pretty much just the minimum for the average tree to grow to a size where it can foster other biomass. On the bigger picture:

"Forests cover 31 percent of the world’s land surface, just over 4 billion hectares. […] This is down from the pre-industrial area of 5.9 billion hectares."

-Earth Policy Institute. http://www.earth-policy.org/indicators/C56/

1.9 billion hectares down in about a century and a half.

My viewpoint now is that there is a deforestation problem in the sense that we destroy forest dependant biomass faster than what it takes for it to recover, but we are still in the time window where the already made harm and the future impact of our deforestation can be reversed, from the viewpoint of Hansen et al we seem to have reversed the negative tendency in tree cover.

Just happened to be the first country on the list.

> it's not even known how much was destroyed by winds or fire and how much is reforested

I know that's an important design flaw: it can't differentiate between man-made deforestation and natural forest change. I'd like for this bot to not exist until there is a way to reliably measure the former.

But if I waited for that to happen probably I'd never have the chance to understand myself and make others see the problem being discussed here.

Moreover, reforestation is not taken in consideration because there is no evidence that reforestation undoes the damage causes by deforestation. Yes, the tree-covered area is there again, but is the biomass, diversity and ecosystems that the disappeared trees fostered there again? That's the real issue here. Let alone the fact that in most reforestation it takes decades on average for the trees to simply grow.

Wood is a renewable resource as long as the rhythm at which we exploit it it's sustainable.

Kind of.

Not exactly a project inside this project, but maybe a separate visualization tool using the GLAD alerts API to allow people to gather the same information the bot does, but in an easy to use website instead of having to use the package itself inside their machines. Unfortunately I'm not much of a designer so this could take a long time.

The newsletter idea sounds cool. Maybe even send detailed reports? There is more data the bot knows on each request but gets ignored for simplicity of the statuses.

However, as of now I'm more concerned about the continuity of the bot, as mLab (where the bot database is) will be terminating their service by November. Currently looking for a free or affordable place to deploy this app.

A little bit of marketing wording I must confess, but it is as real time as you can get with this kind of datasets.

The API that I used for this project along the other APIs by GFW power an app called Forest Watcher that it's pretty real-time.

I emailed them about each and every flaw of their API that I detailed, and some other details I didn't reveal about it.

Their developers and public relationships people are good professionals but I can't stop feeling they are overworked.

Moreover, I detailed those flaws not as empty criticism but rather as instances of software being problematic not because of undocumented behavior but actually because of "undocumented design".

I somewhat understand your point here. In fact this bot has sometimes made feel a little bit miserable.

I detailed this aspect of the bot in a blog post (imnotanerd.herokuapp.com/4).

TLDR: I think this bot remains important because it makes true deforestation data accessible for whoever it may concern and it helps people understand and track the issue in a way that provides certain "feedback" against traditional absolute deforestation data like "x football pitches per minute".

It will make map comparisons with Suriname until this country is deforestated, then it will move to the next country in the list.

1. That's the date the bot started tracking. Actually, deforestation data starts in 2015 but I thought it'd be dishonest of the bot to count in deforestation that happened before the bot release. First drafts of the bot worked this way but that behavior was abandoned.

2. What do you mean by 2%? I guarantee I'm not mixing units, the remaining area shown is the remaining forestal area for the country in display, meaning that if the deforestation rhythm keeps that way, Suriname will be completely deforestated in 1.5 years.

3. The GLAD alerts dataset, which the bot takes as data source, don't make any distinction between forestal area of any type, they just track deforestation based on changes comparison in satellite imagery, Landsat 7 & 8 being the main imagery sources.

4. Then again, GLAD alerts does not provide any info on the causes of the deforestation.

I think globalforestswatch.org have an API based around industrial logging that let's you track industry-based deforestation only, but it's based on in-site reports and it's not as reliable as satellite-based GLAD alerts.

The dedication here is unmatched. Not only it's novice having to write programs on his head with no feedback but also all the hassle there is to run and debug these programs.

Just want to say I hope your brother can keep on this track, he looks on the way to success.

Heads up:

[1] This is a project I've been working in about a year now and is an honorary successor to a similar project a friend started.

You can read in detail how it works at https://imnotanerd.herokuapp.com/3.

Basically it takes data from the API at globalforestwatch.org that uses satellite imagery to gather area of potential forest loss and paints it in a map to make it easy to imagine.

There is no consideration about forest regrowth. This bot does not track forestal area changes, it tracks deforestation.

[2] I'd like to get some community feedback. The bot has now been running for quite some time and it looks like now it works with consistency (The GFW API data is not reliable when recently published).

Mainly I'd like to see how this bot can be improved regarding the data treatment and the display of it, as I still think the maps, despite being accurate, are a little "underperformant" and could be improved.

[3] Yes. I posted this twice, I forgot to put "Show HN" in the title the first time and I realised too late. Now I can't edit nor remove the previous submission.

Hey, there! First time posting to HN. A little info about what and why is this package, and the future of it, in hopes that it catches some attention and gets to help other php developers out there.

I wanted to calculate several statistics about a project I was working on, ideally wanted to write and perform them the same way you write and perform tests with PHPUnit, and I was baffled to discover there wasn't already any existing library to do that, not libraries to do it like PHPUnit, but any library at all.

I created PHPMetro to allow me to just write cases extending from a base case, add data on setUp and automatically perform test methods from console. And I think my library does a pretty good job at it's task.

Despite being an statistical analysis tool it does not provide any methods to perform statistical calculations, there are already very good libraries that do that.

Instead PHPMetro lets you create stacked analysis cases with contained samples that are dinamically generated, and perform and obtain a result from as many tests as you want.

I'm currently working on improving the current run performance, i.e reduce time and memory consumption. Since it's main ability consists in generating sampled data makes sense that it's good at doing that at large scale (samples in the hundreds of thousands in size).

Of course, feel free and welcome to join and contribute to this package if you spot anything that could be fixed and/or improved, I'd also love to receive some feedback about it of people who find it useful/interesting/etc.