Global Forest Watch
Empowering real-time tracking and analysis of our forests.

Empowering real-time tracking and analysis of our forests.

Overview

Impact on Policy & Enforcement

Global Forest Watch was built from scratch, starting with WRI’s early brand foundations and evolving into a full digital platform for exploring forest change worldwide. As the ecosystem grew, it expanded into a broader product family, supporting initiatives like Climate Watch and Resource Watch. Alongside the main platform, we also developed Forest Watcher, a lightweight mobile app designed for local users to track deforestation in the field. Since many communities operate with limited bandwidth, low-end devices, or no reliable connection, the experience had to work with minimal data and offline-first constraints. We also had the chance to run user research and testing sessions directly with these users, grounding the product decisions in real-world conditions.

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My role - Product & Interaction Design

Building the Foundations for a Product Family

Core Contributions:

  • Built the overall information architecture of the platform, ensuring it could scale across regions, datasets, and user needs
  • Helped establish the design system and brand foundations for the product family, evolving the initial WRI branding into a cohesive digital ecosystem
  • Designed key experiences such as the Country Pages, creating a scalable UI system that adapts to highly diverse global and local data contexts
  • Proposed and shaped the Topics framework, defining the UX and architecture to support exploration across thematic areas in a consistent, extensible way
Results

Results that strengthened both the platform and the ecosystem

2M+ people used the platform
Global Forest Watch grew from a brand foundation into a widely used platform, reaching over 2 million users in under five years.
65+ datasets in one place
The platform brings together 65+ global and local datasets, making forest change easier to explore without jumping between tools.
52% less deforestation in 1 year (with Indigenous communities)
After 36 Indigenous communities in the Peruvian Amazon used satellite-based alerts from Global Forest Watch, deforestation rates dropped by 52% in one year.
6,000+ downloads of Forest Watcher (built for offline use)
Forest Watcher, the lightweight companion app for local monitoring, was downloaded 6,000+ times (by 2018), designed for users working with low bandwidth, low-end phones, and unreliable connectivity.
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