Mongabay Data Journalism Tools.

Supporting trusted environmental data reporting.

Since it began in 2020, the partnership between the world’s major global nonprofit environmental science and conservation news outlet Mongabay and Vizzuality has led to the creation of new data journalism tools and custom-made visualizations.

Besides making it easier for journalists to use data and satellite imagery in their reporting, we also partnered with Mongabay in the development of their global directory that identifies successful reforestation projects around the world. 

Mongabay’s Reforestation.app index measures transparency of reforestation projects  to support investors and donors in their search for tree-planting and reforestation initiatives to support.

Scaling up transparency, awareness, and accountability.

Global range for global connections.

Reforestation.app provides publicly available information on more than 360 tree-planting projects in 80 countries.

Transparency through the forest.

With an estimated 1.9 billion trees planted around the world annually, it’s difficult to identify which reforestation projects deserve support.

High-quality satellite imagery.

Trusted open source satellite imagery data accelerate journalistic storytelling outputs.

Visualizing new concepts.

Visual storytelling about ever-evolving processes such as supply chains needs to be supported by flexible tools.

Developing tools for Mongabay.

The brief.

Reforestation

While tree-planting projects and reforestation initiatives have gained popularity around the globe, a lack of transparency and publicly available data makes it difficult for donors and investors to decide which projects they should support. Mongabay created a directory of projects that publicly disclose information relevant to the criteria that scientists have identified as keys to successful reforestation efforts.

Satellite imagery & supply chains

Prior to our collaboration, Mongabay's journalists used various tools to prepare satellite images for publication. However, due to varied experiences in pre-processing and annotating satellite imagery, preparing consistent satellite imagery outputs for their storytelling presented a great challenge.

In addition, Mongabay's investigative journalists needed support in visualizing global supply chains for a story that tracks the expansion of ports along the Amazon’s rivers to uncover links between environmental destruction and supply chains.

Our role.

Reforestation

Vizzuality has supported Mongabay in upgrading Reforestation.app to improve user experience and design. We helped Mongabay in designing a visually appealing and intuitive platform that allows users to browse through different projects. 

Satellite imagery & supply chains

Drawing satellite images from Planet and data from the World Resources Institute, the open source satellite imagery tool makes it easy to customize and export publication-ready maps. 

To help journalists create simple visualizations of global trading networks, we built a tool that exports ready-to-publish images. Journalists can annotate these Trase-inspired maps with additional information such as soy deforestation risk or CO2 emissions risk. 

Delivered with impact.

Enhanced user-experience to access and utilize data. 

Reforestation

Vizzuality’s efforts have resulted in smoother user interactions with the Reforestation.app as a starting point for their reforestation funding endeavors. Investors and donors are now welcomed by a more intuitive interface allowing them to submit, modify, and navigate different projects. Notable improvements also include refined search functionality and step-by-step guidance through the platform.

Satellite imagery & supply chains

Thanks to our development of easy-to-use map tools for satellite image preparation and creating visualizations of trading networks, Mongabay’s journalists are now able to avoid inconsistencies and can focus on showing what exactly is happening on the ground. Both tools have supported reporting in many Mongabay articles, with the map satellite imagery tool even informing Mongabay’s award-winning Forest Trackers series.

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