This study identifies web- and/or smartphone-based technologies that are best suited to civil society-led independent forest monitoring (IFM) in Liberia in terms of:

1. Alerting forest monitors to suspected areas of illegal logging or abuse of community rights. It identifies 17 possible tools, mainly utilising satellite-driven alerts that detect a change in forest cover to potentially inform further investigation on-the-ground. Of these, it provides a detailed description of four of the most promising ones for use by civil society in Liberia.
2. Providing a platform for international dissemination of IFM reports. It briefly reviews this website, loggingoff.info, and one other, the Open Timber Portal.

The key messages from the review include:

• GFW Alerts are likely to be the easiest tool for a small non-governmental organisation with limited funds and minimal technical skills although some mapping skills are useful to manage GIS downloads. It is easy to receive alerts and can be used fully independently, without cost or affiliation.
• ForestEye has the advantage of integration with ForestLink, a tool previously piloted by forest monitors in Liberia and used for collecting alerts from the field level. It is explicitly built for NGO and community use and comes with a high level of support from RFUK. This also, however, makes it dependent on an external organisation and the cost of this may be prohibitive.
• FLEGTWatch and ForestEye both depend on an affiliation with their respective providers, and this may incur a cost. In the past, forest monitors did not see FLEGTWatch as user-friendly and is limited to a dozen areas of interest (mainly concessions or community forests).
• Forest Foresight offers an AI-driven technology for predicting where deforestation is likely to occur, but it to requires formal affiliation with its provider and is not currently available in Liberia. So far it has generally been adopted by state wildlife authorities.
• The study also led to questions about the value of satellite-driven alerts compared to those originating from the field, including from community members. With limited human and financial resources and the short time-frame of many grants available to civil society, it is recommended that the forest monitors continues to focus on improving systems of two-way communication with communities rather than emphasise IFM investigations based on satellite data. Mapping skills, however, could be developed in order to improve the in-house capability to include maps in IFM reports. This would also strengthen the foundation for any future move to embrace alerts derived from satellite imagery.