Nature in Europe is being lost piece by piece. No complete overview has existed on how much is disappearing – until now.
On a Greek island, coastal forest has been turned into a 5-star hotel. Google Earth, Image @ 2025 Airbus.
Using satellite imagery and artificial intelligence (AI), we have, together with 40 journalists and researchers from eleven countries, uncovered large-scale loss of nature and farmland across Europe.
This work builds on our previous collaboration with The Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK) on the investigation “Norway in Red, White and Grey”, published on 6 January 2024. Arena for
Journalism in Europe and NRK took the initiative to scale up this approach to cover the whole of Europe.
How Researchers and Journalists Worked Together
Researcher at The Norwegian Institute for Nature Research (NINA), Zander Venter, has developed a method that uses Google’s AI model and the Dynamic World dataset, based on openly available images from the Sentinel-2 satellites. These satellites orbit the Earth continuously, capturing images of the entire planet at a resolution of 10 meters. The model classifies 10x10 meter squares according to what they contain, for example forest, cropland, or build-up areas.
By comparing images of the same squares over time, NINA’s method can estimate the probability that a nature area has been lost to human activities.
Journalists and volunteers contributed by validating and improving the AI-generated map. They compared the areas the model marked as degraded with aerial photographs to check whether the classification was correct.
“Journalists helped verify more than 10 000 data points using an app I developed. This allowed us to train the model, developed to detect nature loss in Norway, to perform well across other parts of Europe with very different terrain and vegetation”, says Venter.
The result is a massive dataset mapping nature loss across 33 countries in Europe. Investigative journalists have used this dataset to identify case studies of land use change in different countries, showing what drives large-scale loss of nature.
Join a Global Citizen Science Effort
In connection with “Norway in Red, White and Grey”, Venter developed a citizen science app where anyone could help improve the AI model by confirming or rejecting cases of land use change flagged by the system.
Now, Venter has upgraded the app so that anyone can join a global effort to measure nature loss worldwide, while at the same time helping to improve the AI model.
“In the old app, users could zoom in anywhere they liked. In the new version, users are assigned specific locations, which makes the data more reliable”, explains Venter, who hopes this crowdsourcing effort will contribute to trustworthy data on nature loss across the planet.
Try the app “Nature Loss Detector”
Read more about the app and how we contributed to the project Green to Grey
Contacts:
For questions concerning method and data: Zander Venter
For questions on land development in Norway, including tourist cabin development: Trond Simensen
For questions on land development in Europe: Bálint Czúcz