Google DeepMind, Google Research, the World Resources Institute and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis have released Forest Typology (ForTy) 2020, a global map that assigns every 10-by-10-metre patch of land on Earth to one of six forest or land-use types. The categories, based on definitions from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, include primary forest, naturally regenerating forest, planted forest, plantation forest, tree crops and agroforestry, and other land. The group also released an early time series tracking changes each year from 2017 to 2025, showing where natural forests were replaced by plantations or farms. The researchers argue that conventional global maps show only whether trees are present, which is not enough for conservation or compliance. The EU's deforestation regulation (EUDR) requires products such as coffee, cocoa, palm oil and wood furniture to avoid land that was forest in 2020 and has since been converted to agriculture or plantations, so companies and regulators need to know what kind of forest a patch was, not just whether it had trees. The model was trained on about 1.7 million labelled locations drawn from expert surveys and national datasets. It uses AlphaEarth Foundations embeddings, compact summaries of years of satellite observations, to detect planting patterns, growth cycles and harvest rhythms. Validation against more than 9,000 randomly chosen sites, each checked by two trained experts, found the correct forest type 90% of the time and the correct forest-versus-non-forest call 95% of the time. The team says this outperforms other global forest maps. Rather than a single label, ForTy gives a probability score for each class. For Australian businesses, the direct impact is limited to firms that trade forest-linked commodities or wood products with the EU. Importers, exporters and suppliers of timber, furniture, coffee, cocoa or palm oil may face EUDR due diligence requirements, and a map like this could become a reference point for showing that land was not converted from forest after 2020. The map is a research release rather than a compliance tool with a set cost, so there is nothing to adopt yet. Businesses in those supply chains should ask their EU buyers how they plan to verify origin. It does not involve personal information, so the Privacy Act 1988 is not directly relevant. For everyone else, it changes nothing today, though foresters, agronomists and sustainability analysts may find the Earth Engine app worth exploring.