Mongabay.org

Mongabay regularly uses satellite imagery and information provided by reports from Global Forest Watch (GFW) to assess and investigate deforestation trends in forested areas ranging from the purely local to the global scale. However, GFW has announced that it will no longer produce investigations related to locations where deforestation is found to be occurring, but instead work with news outlets like Mongabay to collect field intelligence and then report on the findings, in a program called Places to Watch.

GFW’s goal is to continue producing timely, data-driven reports spotlighting areas of recent deforestation that pose the biggest threat to the world’s remaining forests, and now aims to partner with outlets like this one to investigate:

“Mongabay will be a leading contributor to this initiative by assigning journalists from their global reporting network to follow up on alerts and produce original news stories which add insight, character and context to Places to Watch,” according to their statement about it.

Mongabay correspondents will report on these alerts from all over the tropics for its Forest Trackers series, but we are particularly looking for reporters in these regions:

• Southeast Asia (Laos, Cambodia, The Philippines)
• Oceania (Australia, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands)
• Central Africa (Democratic Republic of the Congo, Cameroon, Republic of the Congo, Central African Republic)
• West Africa (Ghana, Liberia, Sierra Leone)
• South America (Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela)
• Central America (Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua)

If you are a writer based in the tropics and are available for assignments to investigate alerts from Places to Watch for Mongabay, in the countries listed above or elsewhere, please share your details here.

Banner image: Map produced using GFW’s tools for a recent feature in the Forest Trackers series in Cameroon, where a rubber plantation was found to have expanded into 127 square kilometers of primary rainforest.