THE PROJECT

The MapBiomas Amazonia initiative annually develops a mapping of land cover and land use in the Amazon, as well as a mapping of water surfaces in the Amazonian countries. This project is carried out by a collaborative network of experts from each of the involved countries, with expertise in topics such as land use, water dynamics, remote sensing, GIS, and programming. It is based on the organizational structure of the Amazon Georeferenced Socio-Environmental Information Network (RAISG) and has established partnerships with CIAT to achieve this new water surface monitoring product.

Like all products generated in this collaboration, these results have been obtained through cloud processing and the use of automated classifiers that have been developed and operated from the Google Earth Engine platform. This has allowed the creation of a historical series of maps.

ORIGIN

Since 2009, the Amazon Georeferenced Socio-Environmental Information Network (RAISG) has been working on the creation of deforestation maps for the Amazon region, using increasingly advanced processing tools. In the search for options to automate processes and generate more detailed information, the RAISG-MapBiomas consortium was created in March 2017, resulting in the MapBiomas Amazonia alliance. Its main objective is to produce annual land cover and land use maps for the entire Amazon, using the methodology previously developed for the biomes of Brazil by the MapBiomas team. Now, this initiative has expanded thematically to include the monitoring of water surfaces, following a similar model of technical cooperation and covering the entirety of the Amazonian countries geographically.

PURPOSE

To contribute to the understanding of land-use dynamics and water surface in the Amazonian countries that are part of the Amazon based on:

• The development and implementation of a fast, reliable, and low-cost methodology to generate annual land cover and land use maps from 1985 to the present (with subsequent annual updates).
• The creation of a platform to facilitate the dissemination of the methodology and results to other interested countries and regions.
• The establishment of a collaborative network of specialists in Amazonian biomes to map land cover, land use and land-use change dynamics.

INITIATIVE CHARACTERISTICS

• Collaborative work with institutions from the different Amazonian countries to optimize solutions.
• Distributed and automated data processing in partnership with Google Earth Engine.
• Generation of an open and replicable platform.
• Collaborative platform designed to incorporate contributions from the scientific community and others interested in collaborating.