Bolivia Weekly Deforestation Alerts (Global Forest Watch)

## What this measures

The area, in hectares, of natural forest in Bolivia where satellites flagged likely tree loss each week. It sums Global Forest Watch's integrated deforestation alerts, which combine optical alerts from the University of Maryland's GLAD system with radar alerts from Wageningen University's RADD system at 10-metre resolution. Only alerts inside the Science Based Targets Network's Natural Forests map are counted, and all confidence levels are included. Weeks run Monday to Sunday and are dated to their Monday.

## Why it matters

Bolivia's lowland forests have seen some of the fastest clearing in the tropics, much of it from fire and farming. Annual tree cover loss arrives once a year, months after the fact; these alerts show clearing within weeks, so they are the earliest public read of forest pressure from farming, mining, roads and fire.

## How to read it

Higher means more forest flagged that week. Clearing follows the dry season and fire, so compare a week with the same weeks a year earlier, or look at a 4- or 13-week total, rather than reading one week against the last. Fire seasons dominate Bolivia's pattern; a bad fire year shows up as weeks far above the year before.

## What it does not say

An alert is a satellite detection of likely disturbance, not a confirmed or legal-status finding: it includes fire, selective logging and natural events as well as clearing, and the area is the area of flagged 10-metre pixels. New alerts start at low confidence and are confirmed or dropped over the following weeks, so the latest four to six weeks are revised, usually upward. Cloud cover can delay optical detection. Alerts are dated to first detection, which can trail the clearing. The numbers are not comparable with annual tree cover loss, which uses a different method.

## Source

Source: "Integrated Deforestation Alerts". UMD/GLAD and WUR, accessed through Global Nature Watch (Global Forest Watch Data API, World Resources Institute, https://www.globalforestwatch.org), country table gadm__integrated_alerts__iso_daily_alerts. Licence: Creative Commons BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Changes made by Palanor: alerts are limited to natural forests, summed by country and week, and rounded to 0.1 ha; the split by confidence level is kept with each observation. Global Forest Watch serves a rolling two-year window, so history starts in October 2024 and grows from there. This is not a Global Forest Watch product, and its publishers do not endorse Palanor's use of it.