Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the newest tool in the arsenal to prevent the degradation and depletion of forests, with new research revealing how the technology can help protect the ecosystem. Charles Darwin University (CDU) researchers have collaborated on an international study, led by the University of Sri Lanka, to develop an AI model which detects changes in forest cover, or the amount of land surface covered by trees. According to the United Nations, between 2000 and 2022 there was a net forest area loss of 100 million hectares. Researchers took U-Net architecture—which is used for image segmentation often in biomedical image analysis—and adapted it to compare past and present pictures of the ecosystem and detect where forest loss has occurred. This custom model was fed a dataset of images from Google Earth and was able to detect forest cover changes with an accuracy of 94.37%.