Global Forest Watch vs Restor

Verdict

Global Forest Watch and Restor share more than most pairs in this category: both are free, funded by philanthropic and institutional backers rather than user fees, both draw on open satellite data (Restor explicitly layers on Global Forest Watch's own data among its sources), and both are aimed at people who need forest and land data without running their own remote-sensing operation. The difference is direction — one watches for loss, the other maps restoration.

Global Forest Watch, run by the World Resources Institute, is built for monitoring: annual tree cover loss and gain back to 2000, near-real-time GLAD and RADD deforestation alerts updated every few days at roughly 10–30m resolution, and daily fire alerts, with subscribable areas of interest and a public API. It is the tool for "is deforestation happening here, and when."

Restor, incubated by the Crowther Lab at ETH Zurich with Google's support, is built for discovery: a public map where restoration and conservation projects register themselves, layered with satellite-derived context — tree cover and biomass trends, biodiversity intactness, rainfall, soil, nearby protected areas — so funders, scientists and the public can find and compare projects. It is the tool for "which restoration sites exist, and how are they doing."

Choose Global Forest Watch if

• You need to monitor deforestation or land-use change in a specific region, on an ongoing basis, with alerting.
• Your use case is supply-chain risk, regulatory tracking, or journalism about where forest loss is occurring right now.
• You want the longest-running, most established free deforestation alert system with a well-documented API.

Choose Restor if

• You are a restoration practitioner wanting to register a site publicly and attract funders or collaborators.
• You are a funder or researcher trying to discover and compare restoration and conservation projects across a region or ecosystem type.
• You want project-level ecological context — biomass, biodiversity intactness, soil — attached to a specific registered site rather than a general monitoring layer.

What they share

Both are genuinely free with no tiers to navigate, both are built on credible open data rather than proprietary sensor networks, and neither certifies carbon credits — that is a distinct market covered by tools like Pachama and Sylvera (see Pachama vs Sylvera). Many organizations will end up using both: Global Forest Watch to monitor a region for loss, Restor to find or register the restoration work responding to it.