Not All Green
Most maps only show whether trees are there, so every forest is the same green. But an old rainforest, a timber plantation and an oil palm farm are very different places.
One green becomes five. ForTy, a global map from Google DeepMind and its partners, sorts every 10-metre patch of land on Earth by the kind of tree cover it holds.
Amazon
Native forest with no visible sign of human disturbance. It holds far more carbon and biodiversity than a timber plantation. If people clear it, what grows back belongs to another class on this map.
Finland
Forest that people planted or seeded and manage on long cycles: ForTy draws the line at rotations of more than 40 years. It is also the map’s least certain forest class, easily confused with natural regrowth and with plantations.
Galicia
Two histories, side by side. Plantations are intensively managed tree farms of one or two species, cut within 40 years. Naturally regenerating forest grew back on its own after people cleared the land.
Sabah
Farms that grow something other than wood, like oil palm, rubber, cocoa or fruit. They are tree cover, but not forest, and from above they share a green with the primary forest that makes up another 38% of this area.
The EU’s deforestation regulation takes 2020 as its baseline. ForTy maps the world’s forest types in that same year.
West Kalimantan
2020
A 12 km square of lowland forest in West Kalimantan, Borneo, in the baseline year of the EU’s deforestation regulation. Nearly all of it is primary or naturally regenerating forest.
West Kalimantan
2021
Primary forest drops sharply, losing almost a fifth of its area in a single year.
West Kalimantan
2022
Primary forest keeps falling, to just over a third of the square.
West Kalimantan
2023
Primary forest is down to about a fifth of the square, and plantation forest starts to spread.
West Kalimantan
2024
Primary forest barely changes, while plantation forest keeps growing.
West Kalimantan
2025
Five years after the baseline, primary forest covers about a third of the area it did in 2020. The map shows what changed, not why.
About
Data: Forest Typology (ForTy) 2020 v1 — Google DeepMind, Google Research, WRI, IIASA. CC-BY 4.0. Neumann et al., Scientific Data (2026). Relief: ETOPO 2022, NOAA NCEI. Place names: Natural Earth. Time series: ForTy v2 beta, early release. Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data 2017–2025.