# Google DeepMind — Beyond tree cover: mapping the world’s forest types

- Company: Google DeepMind (deepmind.google)
- Announced: 2026-10-22T14:30:24+00:00
- Category: research-paper
- Coverage: not counted
- Announcement: yes
- Group: announcements
- Source: https://deepmind.google/blog/beyond-tree-cover-mapping-the-worlds-forest-types/
- Record: https://forck.live/items/26645-beyond-tree-cover-mapping-the-world-s-forest-types
- Subject: Gemini
- Models affected: ForTy

Google DeepMind and Google Research, with the World Resources Institute and IIASA, released Forest Typology (ForTy) 2020, a global map that sorts every 10-by-10-meter patch of land into six forest and land-use types. The map answers a question tree-cover maps cannot: whether a patch is primary forest, naturally regenerating forest, planted forest, plantation forest, tree crops and agroforestry, or other land. The partners say it is a key baseline for the EU's deforestation regulation, which requires products such as coffee, cocoa and palm oil to come from land that was not forest in 2020. An early time series tracks yearly changes from 2017 to 2025, showing for the first time at 10-meter detail what replaced lost forest, whether a timber plantation, tree-crop farm or other land. The model was trained on about 1.7 million labeled locations and uses AlphaEarth Foundations embeddings to pick up planting patterns, growth cycles and harvest rhythms. Validated against more than 9,000 randomly chosen sites, ForTy identified the right forest type 90% of the time and told forest from non-forest land 95% of the time, the partners say, outperforming other global forest maps. Rather than a yes-or-no label, it gives a probability score for each class so users can adapt the classification to regional contexts.

## Evidence

Verbatim from https://deepmind.google/blog/beyond-tree-cover-mapping-the-worlds-forest-types/:

> ForTy picked the right forest type 90% of the time, and told forest apart from non-forest land 95% of the time, outperforming other global forest maps.

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