Newsletter - March 2026
New Indonesia Forest Zones, supply chain refinery insights, and upcoming AI features in Palmoil.io—plus a webinar on jurisdictional monitoring and a tip to streamline portfolio management.
Indonesia Forest Zones
You will now find profile pages for all 24,740 forest zones in Indonesia, including 837 Conservation Areas and 8,530 Protected Forests. Every month, we monitor all forest zones for new deforestation, as well as a range of other risk metrics such as GHG emissions, historical forest loss, HCS areas, and planted palm. We also identify palm plantations that overlap with each forest zone and flag related grievances. The interactive map provides contextual layers, along with the locations of analyst-verified deforestation events.
How this helps you
If you are investing in a landscape initiative, Indonesia Forest Zones provides regular, accurate forest monitoring. The dashboards offer monthly forest alerts, flag alert spikes, and track deforestation rates over time. They also include statistics and maps of remaining forest cover, along with 25 years of land-use change data. Risk metrics can be used to assess conservation values such as remaining HCS forest, peat areas, and annual GHG emissions.
If you are monitoring your palm supply chain, Forest Zone dashboards can help identify potential NDPE and EUDR risks. This includes detecting overlapping oil palm plantations, estimating volumes of planted palm within conservation and protected area boundaries, and providing information about nearby mills, including unresolved grievances and linked buyers. Forest Zones can reveal risks that many monitoring systems do not detect.
Supplying refineries
If you are a downstream company, you can now identify refineries that are likely part of your supply chain. On your dashboard, you will see a new tab called “Likely Supplying Facilities.” We match mills in your mill list to refinery mill lists to determine which refineries supply you. You will see a list of refineries along with the percentage of mills successfully matched.
How this helps you
As refineries are key bottlenecks in palm oil supply chains, the supplying refinery feature helps narrow risks down to specific facilities. Facility dashboards provide DCF/NDPE statistics, grievance lists, estimated traceability to plot, and buyer information. This allows you to identify not only high-risk suppliers, but also the facilities they supply. This is particularly useful for downstream companies that do not source directly from refineries.
2. What’s coming up?
April Webinar
Jurisdictional monitoring in Practice
The topic of our next webinar will be “Jurisdictional Monitoring in Practice.” We will explore real-world applications of the jurisdictional dashboard feature, including our work supporting the Leuser Ecosystem’s Project Management Unit (PMU).
Each month, the PMU receives analyst-verified reports of new deforestation events within conservation areas such as Rawa Singkil. Stakeholders can also submit reports directly to the PMU’s Case Tracker. We will explain the technology and methods we use, and discuss how this approach can be adapted to other landscapes.
The sign up details will be sent shortly.
What we are working on
Palmoil.io + AI
AI tools are rapidly gaining traction. Like many forest monitoring companies, we have been integrating AI into our workflows, and we are now exploring ways to incorporate AI directly into Palmoil.io.
This has the potential to improve on existing AI-driven forest monitoring tools. Most rely on public data that is often too general, unreliable, or incomplete—particularly when it comes to critical information such as plot-level supply chain traceability and property boundaries.
Palmoil.io, however, contains this data—structured and verified by our analysts. Initial tests have already shown the potential of combining our extensive database and deep insights with the power of AI to analyze information, answer questions, generate and edit text, and help solve problems. We will have more updates soon.
Meet the Team
Leo Bottrill, our Founder and CEO, has spent over two decades tracking the causes of deforestation to support better decision-making. Before founding MapHubs, he launched the Moabi initiative, which strengthened independent forest monitoring in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Earlier in his career, Leo worked with the World Wildlife Fund and Fauna & Flora International across the Congo Basin, Southeast Asia, and other tropical forest regions. He spent nearly four years in Vietnam working on protected area management and species conservation, and 18 months living and working in South Sulawesi, Indonesia. He still enjoys practicing his (rusty) Bahasa Indonesia with colleagues in Jakarta.
Tip of the month
Bulk Save Portfolio List
Did you know you can create a portfolio list in bulk? Instead of saving entries one by one, you can streamline your workflow using the Bulk Save feature in Palmoil.io.
Apply your filters or sorting preferences, click the Bulk Save icon, name your portfolio, and you’re done. This approach saves time and makes your monitoring more efficient and focused.
Follow us on LinkedIn
To stay updated on upcoming webinars, feature releases, and industry insights, follow us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/maphubs