The Economist: “Peru’s forests cover 72m hectares of the country (278,000 square miles). That is three times the area of Britain. And Peru intends to hold on to its greenery. In 2000 its deforestation rate was 250,000 hectares a year. By 2005 that figure was down to 150,000. This year, according to Antonio Brack Egg, the country’s environment minister, it will be 90,000. In 2021, if all goes well, it will be zero. To make sure things stay on course, Dr Brack says, the government needs to spend more than $100m a year on high-resolution satellite pictures of its billions of trees. But he hopes that a computing facility developed by the Planetary Skin Institute (PSI), a not-for-profit organisation set up by Cisco Systems, a large computing firm, and America’s space agency, NASA, might help cut that budget. The PSI’s Automated Land-change Evaluation, Reporting and Tracking System, ALERTS, is one of several tools being developed to assess the extent and health of forests and other ecosystems. These tools should make the implementation of a deal on reducing deforestation called REDD+, agreed on at the United Nations’ climate-change conference in Cancún on December 11th (see article), easier to monitor. The PSI’s intention is to apply the world’s ever-increasing supply of information to the problem of its ever-dwindling natural resources by merging data of different types. ALERTS, which was launched at Cancún, uses data from NASA’s MODIS cameras (of which two are currently in orbit) data-mining algorithms developed at the University of Minnesota and a lot of computing power from Cisco’s “cloud” of machines to spot places where land use has changed.”