ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we conduct a desktop analysis of the Global Forest Watch (GFW) platform. We first ask our basic definition research questions: what counts as a tree and a forest in the platform, and who gets to determine these things? What is the media ecology of GFW? Then, we evaluate the platform according to our storyworld networking criteria, asking what capacity there is for users to upload local views of forests in the platform and work with them without them being reduced or reconciled to the global view. We find that GFW does act within a Google Gaia paradigm; however, there are significant opportunities for users to represent local views by uploading data and working with the platform offline.
