FAQ

MapBiomas is an initiative of the Climate Observatory and a collaborative network of non-governmental organizations, universities and companies in Brazil, organized with the objective of using quality and low-cost technology to produce annual series of maps (from 1985 onwards).

MapBiomas Amazonia is an initiative coordinated by the Amazonian Network of Geo-referenced Socio-environmental Information (RAISG). Its objective is to generate annual land cover and land use maps for the entire Amazon (1985-2021), based on the methodology developed for the Brazilian biomes by the Mapbiomas team.

MapBiomas Amazonía involves researchers and specialists in remote sensing, informatics, ecosystems, and land use from each of the participating countries (Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Venezuela). The team works from their national offices and laboratories under close international coordination. All work is done using cloud computing through the Google Earth Engine platform.

The land cover and land use maps and Landsat mosaics can be downloaded through the following link: http://amazonia.mapbiomas.org/download

In this link you will find a tool in Google Earth Engine that allows the download of the complete collection, as well as the download by specific territorial or temporal slices.

Don't forget to download the legend codes at: http://amazonia.mapbiomas.org/codigos-de-la-leyenda

Each layer represents a year in the time series. For example, in Collection 4, layer 0 = 1985 and layer 36 = 2021. 

Large time series of land cover and land use maps generated at the scale that MapBiomas Amazonía works (30 m pixels) are not practical in vector format. All data processing is done in raster format, pixel by pixel.

There is no such possibility on the MapBiomas Amazon platform. Map vectorization is extremely expensive in terms of computational resources and impractical for the whole territory. The recommended solution, if you want to work with vector, is to download the data, make the territorial or spatial cutout of your interest and then vectorize with your preferred software.

Yes, MapBiomas Amazon data are public and free for non-commercial use or for public interest purposes.

Yes, MapBiomas Amazonia collections are available as layers (assets) on the Google Earth Engine and can be accessed, processed and analyzed directly on the platform, without the need to download the data.

MapBiomas Amazon data are public and free, you can make use of them by simply referring to the source with the following format: 

"MapBiomas Amazonía Project - Collection [version] of annual land cover and land use maps, accessed on [date] via link: [LINK] " 

"The MapBiomas Amazonía project is a multi-institutional initiative to generate annual land cover and land use maps from automatic classification processes applied to satellite imagery. The complete description of the project can be found at http://amazonia.mapbiomas.org ".

You must have a Google Earth Engine (GEE) account, which can be registered through the following link: https://earthengine.google.com.

By accessing the GEE Code Editor (https://code.earthengine.google.com), you can start scripts to view and process data.

In this link you can find examples of Scripts to access MapBiomas Amazon data in Google Earth Engine.

The detailed description of the legend is available for download at:

http://amazonia.mapbiomas.org/codigos-de-la-leyenda

Yes, land cover and land use statistics, as well as transition matrices for the entire Amazon region, biomes, states and municipalities are available for download at:

http://amazonia.mapbiomas.org/estadistica

The transition matrices for the entire country, biomes, states and municipalities are available for download at:

http://amazonia.mapbiomas.org/estadistica

To download the data by states or municipalities, they can be generated with Google Earth Engine, accessing the scripts available at the link. You must select the state, the municipality, the years of interest and export it to your Google Drive folder.

https://code.earthengine.google.com/?accept_repo=users/mapbiomas/user-toolkit-amazonia

Landsat has an average resolution of 30 m, so it is common to associate the area of a pixel to 900 m². But, since the original MapBiomas Amazon data are created following the GEE standard representation (Lat/Long and WGS84), it does not use an equivalent projection (equal area). Therefore, the distance from the target to the Equator line influences the pixel size. Therefore, at continental scale, the calculation of pixel count and multiplication by 900 m² should be avoided.

In MapBiomas Amazon we apply two methods to calculate the area:

1 - When performed outside Google Earth Engine, we reproduce the MapBiomas Amazonia datum for the UTM system and calculate the metric value of the central pixel, located at the intersection between the reference 1: 250,000 chart and the area of interest. Then, we count all the pixels within the area of interest and multiply by the reference value, in m², of the central pixel previously calculated.

2 - When the calculation is performed in Google Earth Engine, we apply the function ee.Image.pixelArea () which generates an image in which the value of each pixel is the area of that pixel in square meters, taking into account possible cartographic distortions.

You can access the description of all the reference maps used by MapBiomas Amazon at: https://amazonia.mapbiomas.org/mapas-de-referencia