When the Earthworm Foundation and Airbus launched Starling in 2016, the mission was ambitious: create a single, credible system to hold global companies accountable to their "No Deforestation" pledges.
The co-development successfully married Airbus's cutting-edge space technology (utilizing resolutions down to 30cm via satellites like Pléiades Neo) with the Earthworm Foundation's on-the-ground expertise and commitment to human-centric change.
Over the past decade, monitoring 5.8 million sqkm of forest globally across 40+ countries, the data revealed that the enemy wasn't static. The trends have forced the partnership to evolve from a simple monitoring tool into an integrated platform for compliance, climate action, and ecosystem preservation.
Here are the five major trends uncovered by the Starling platform, and how the Earthworm Foundation has pivoted its strategy accordingly.
The Shift: Initial efforts focused on large-scale clearing. Over time, as corporate commitments curtailed major industrial clearance, the dominant form of forest loss shifted to small-scale, sporadic forest degradation, often driven by smallholder farmers.
The challenge became one of detection accuracy, particularly in dense forest canopies. Starling's 2023 global accuracy assessment validated this success, confirming that 90% of all forest cover changes detected were accurate.
