Mandeep Singh sits in front of his computer screen painstakingly drawing small shapes over satellite images of dense forests across Australia. Singh is an environmental investigator for the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF). The images he’s drawing on teach the algorithm not just what a forest looks like from a satellite, but what a bulldozed forest looks like. He’s also teaching it how to recognise seasonal change and other natural phenomena.

He continues doing this, image after image, until he feels the algorithm is as good as it can get. When the algorithm is ready, he puts it to work, letting it detect land clearing across the country by giving it two images of the same spot taken a few months apart.

“Once it’s done this, it will create snapshots of the places,” he says.

These snapshots are put up on ACF Investigates, an online citizen science platform where anyone with a phone, laptop or access to a library computer can go through images that were flagged by the algorithm.

Volunteers are given before‑and‑after images of an 18‑square‑kilometre section of bushland with a grid overlay. They’re asked to flag anything that looks like deforestation by clicking on the grid squares where they think it’s occurring.

In the late 2010s, around 58,000 hectares of Australian primary forests were levelled to the ground every year. That’s almost 70 MCG pitches worth of established, biodiverse forests that are crucial to the survival of native plants and wildlife gone.

And that’s just primary forests. If you add regrowth forest clearing into the mix, more than 400,000 hectares of forest were lost annually. Much of this deforestation goes unnoticed due to its sheer scale, but also because of where it occurs, according to Singh.

“It’s [happening] in the middle of nowhere,” he says.

Government data shows that most forest loss is occurring in regional New South Wales and Queensland, where livestock production is the main driving factor. According to the Worldwide Fund for Nature, the north‑eastern coast of Australia is one of the world’s 24 “deforestation fronts”, and the only one located in a developed country.

Because it’s mostly happening in remote and hard‑to‑access areas, Singh and the three other investigators at ACF rely on satellite imagery to identify deforestation. However, a team of four is not enough to go through the millions of images they need to analyse.

The volunteers play an integral part in analysing the enormous amount of imagery.

Citizen science or crowdsourcing is quite common in the conservation world. Dr Dietmar Wechsler, a climate measure researcher, has studied crowdsourcing in the context of climate change mitigation. This approach has grown in popularity over the last two decades.

“Technological advancements such as online platforms, smartphones, apps, and satellite observations has significantly contributed to this trend,” he tells upstart.

Wechsler says these types of projects usually produce high‑quality data, but it’s important not to make tasks too complicated.

One of the 1,500 volunteers is Zaynab Malik, a software engineer who heard about the project through a friend. She has started using the tool between meetings and when she would otherwise be “doomscrolling” on social media.

“I feel like it is a better use of time, especially if you’re not doing anything,” she tells upstart.

Malik has been involved with other types of volunteering related to climate action. She has participated in multiple creek clean‑ups around Melbourne. She says that type of volunteering requires a much bigger sacrifice of time and planning, and she appreciates the flexibility that ACF Investigates offers.

It’s the third time ACF have run this crowdsourced project. Last time, in 2024, 675 people scanned almost 5 million hectares of land. After careful review by ACF investigators, they found 90,000 hectares of cleared habitat. From those 90,000 hectares, ACF reported 76 cases of illegal land clearing.

In the current project, once 10 people have flagged the same image on the platform, it gets sent to one of the four investigators. This saves ACF hundreds of hours of work. The next step in the process is for Singh and his team to determine whether deforestation has taken place. If it has, they’ll investigate whether it’s unethical or illegal.

However, ACF was unable to tell upstart how many of those reports resulted in fines or other legal action against landowners.

“Because the department hasn’t publicised the outcomes in five or so years now,” Singh says. “But we do know that about a quarter of the cases the department is looking into are cases we’ve brought to them.”

This time around, Singh and his team are hoping volunteers can help them investigate 11.5 million hectares of land. So far, more than 1,500 people have completed over 83,000 tasks. By late April 2026, 73 per cent of the 11.5 million hectares had already been scanned.

“There is actually a decent chance that we might even have to close the project earlier because we’ll just end up finishing at this rate,” he says.

Malik is keenly aware of how voluntary efforts like hers make an overwhelming task easier.

“You can contribute five minutes of your time [and it] would save hours for [the investigators]. Then they can just go after reports of deforestation instead of checking if there was deforestation to begin with.”

Singh says the goal of ACF Investigates is not just to uncover deforestation, but also to encourage people like Malik and people with less experience in volunteering to participate and care about climate action.

“A lot of the people that we’ve seen using it this time around have never done anything like this before,” he says.

“[It] allows people to feel empowered even if they’re not actually getting up and standing in front of the bulldozers,” he says. “They’re playing a role, and every little bit helps.”