The area covered by forest in the Amazon continues to decline in the face of the growth of extractive activities

The second collection of Annual Land Use and Coverage Maps, a tool to monitor this transformation in the nine countries of the Amazon region, is now available, between 1985 and 2018, as well as the pressures facing its forests and natural ecosystems.

The maps, graphs, and data from the platform are produced by the Amazon Georeferenced Socio-environmental Information Network (RAISG) and the Mapbiomas Brazil team.

More than three decades of unprecedented history about the state of forests cover, as well as trends and changes that occur annually in the use of the Amazonian biome soil, are gathered in this second collection of the Mapbiomas Amazonía platform. The maps have a spatial resolution of 30 meters and were generated by technicians and specialists from each of the countries of the region, characteristic that allows a greater level of detail and precision in the information obtained.

This tool has a coating, especially on the Amazonian biome. From the Andes, passing through the Amazon plain and transitions with the Cerrado and the Pantanal. The analysis shows that between 1985 and 2018, there was a loss of 72.4 million hectares of natural plant cover; an area equivalent to the territory of Chile that means a growth of 172% in areas dedicated to agriculture and livestock in 33 years. However, the Amazon biome still maintains 83.4% of its natural plant cover.

How it works

Mapbiomas Amazonía Collection 2.0 1985-2018' allows to visualize freely, free and downloadable maps at regional, national and even local level; identify areas covered with forests, natural fields, mangroves, agriculture, and rivers, among other classes and understand the dynamics of land-use change within and outside an Indigenous Territory or a Protected Area. For example, it is possible to identify red areas, where important changes have taken places, such as the replacement of forest by agricultural crops or pastures.

Another major contribution in this second collection is that, in addition to exploring maps and geographic information, users can access statistics, associated dynamic charts and graphs to understand how these transformations have taken place over a given period of time and geographical spread.

How it was done

The information contained in the platform is homogeneous in terms of methodology and scale and is therefore comparable for all countries. Similarly, this tool contributes to the delimitation of shared ecosystems among several countries of the region in response to a common objective: to understand and manage the Amazon with a comprehensive vision, as a complex system that crosses borders.

It also contemplates 21 types of land cover that include the Andean glaciers and the forest formations of the Amazonian plains, with a detail and precision of analysis exclusive to this platform.

All data processing is performed with automatic classification algorithms, through cloud data hosted on the Google Earth Engine platform. In addition, altitudinal variations specific to the Andean Amazon and particularities of each ecosystem were considered, through a regional subdivision that makes automatic classification more precise.

The evolution of the platform

Mapbiomas initially developed this land-use monitoring tool for Brazil. However, the contribution of all the organizations that make up the Amazon Georeferenced Socio-environmental Information Network (RAISG) adjusted the results and analysis to the geography of each of the Amazonian countries; In this way, local knowledge has enabled the tool to be improved and data interpretation to be refined.

Thus, in 2019, the first Collection covering the period 2000-2017 was presented. Today, after an intense work of the RAISG -with the technical collaboration of the team of Mapbiomas Brazil and financial collaboration of the Moore Foundation- this second Collection contributes to the knowledge and analysis of the Amazon with a regional approach, a shared territory. For this reason, it includes information as important as the vectors of pressure on forests and other coverages such as mining, oil, waterways, and hydropower.