How Greenpeace’s investigative site, Unearthed, used satellite imagery and database mapping to reveal hundreds of fires on environmentally protected land in the English moors – including dozens that could be illegal.
GIJN Spanish associate editor Mariel Lozada offers a behind-the-scenes look at a reporting collaboration that uncovers the vast scale of illegal mining and illicit smuggling in Venezuela’s Amazon region.
This edition of the GIJN Toolbox explores global databases and remote sensing resources that reporters can use to investigate local environmental threats.
To share best practices from our most recent global conference, GIJC21, we are releasing a series of videos from the event’s many seminars, panels, and workshops. This latest installment focuses on investigative tips and tools for using satellite imagery, flight tracking, and exposing disinformation.
For newsrooms looking to deepen their understanding of how artificial intelligence could be used for investigative reporting, the 150-year-old Argentinian newspaper La Nación is blazing a trail and has produced a diverse range of stories assisted by AI technologies and has created an AI lab.
Satellite imagery provides information that can enhance the ability to write compelling narratives about the state of our planet, cutting across multiple beats. But such a tool tends to be complex and out of the reach for many journalists, so this guide offers a process that reporters interested in covering the climate crisis can use for story projects.
Our weekly NodeXL curation of the most popular data journalism stories on Twitter features several climate change-related stories: snowless Winter Olympics, a look at the carbon footprint of popular food, how the world’s largest beef producer is fueling deforestation in the Amazon, and a Climate Promise Detector project reviewing the stance of presidential candidates on climate change in Costa Rica.
Journalists are increasingly using the tools of science journalism and scientific inquiry to carry out in-depth data and investigative reporting, and even to shine a spotlight on questionable scientific findings.
NASA’S Landsat 9 satellite went into orbit on September 27. After about three months of shakedown and calibration, it will be regularly downloading data to anyone who asks. It can show trends in deforestation (or afforestation or reforestation), forest health, agricultural crops, coastal erosion, drought and flooding, and more.
In a GIJC21 session on using maps and satellite imagery for investigations, three experts explained their approaches to analyzing satellite and drone images, and using open source tools. One of the innovative techniques described led to a Pulitzer Prize this year — for exposing China’s network of Muslim detention centers — while another exposed government deception about fires in the Amazon, and a third literally put a vulnerable community in Africa on the map.
