The “Amazon Annual Land Cover and Land Use Mapping” Project is an initiative that involves a collaborative network of, land use, remote sensing, GIS and programming  experts. It’s based on cloud computing and automated classifiers found in Google Earth Engine to generate a time series of annual land use and land cover maps of the Amazon.

ORIGIN

Since 2009, the Amazonian Network of Georeferenced Socio-Environmental Information (RAISG) has produced deforestation maps of the Amazon applying state-of -the-art  processing tools. The RAISG-MapBiomas consortium was created in March 2017 in the search of alternatives to process automation and more detailed information generation. Its objective is to generate annual maps of land cover and use for the entire Amazon, based on the methodology developed by MapBiomas Brazil.

PURPOSE

To contribute to the understanding of land use dynamics in the 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 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.

CHARACTERISTICS OF THE INITIATIVE

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