The Forest Conservation Evaluation Tool: Accessible impact evaluation for Latin America

Abstract

The Forest Conservation Evaluation Tool is a user-friendly webtool that measures the effect on tree cover loss of place-based conservation policies such as protected areas and payments for environmental services. It allows nontechnical users to conduct impact evaluations using high spatial resolution satellite data on tree cover loss along with statistical techniques that control for confounding factors. Because it has all requisite data on board and features a map- and menu-based interface, most users can generate intuitive results in single short session.

Keywords

• Propensity score matching
• satellite data
• webtool
• deforestation