MapBiomas

Project

THE PROJECT

The Project of "Annual Mapping of Land Cover and Use of the Gran Chaco Americano" is an initiative that involves a collaborative network of specialists from Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil and Paraguay, in topics such as land use, satellite remote sensing, GIS and programming. It uses cloud processing and automated classifiers developed and operated from the Google Earth Engine platform to generate a historical series of annual maps of land cover and use in the Gran Chaco Americano.

PURPOSE

  • Contribute to the understanding of land cover and use dynamics in the Gran Chaco Americano, based on the development and implementation of a fast, reliable and low-cost methodology to generate annual maps of land cover and use, from 1985 to the present (and then updating annually).
  • Creation of a web platform to facilitate the dissemination of the methodology and access to results: Products and Sub-products.
  • Establish a collaborative network of specialists in the countries to map land use and cover and dynamics of change.

CHARACTERISTICS OF THE INITIATIVE

  • Networking with the responsible institutions of the different countries.
  • Distributed and automated data processing through an alliance with Google Earth Engine.
  • Work oriented to generate an open and multipillable platform.
  • Collaborative platform designed to incorporate and welcome the contributions of the scientific community interested in collaborating.

ORIGIN

MapBiomas Chaco starts in February 2017 as a continuation of the MapBiomas Brazil project within the framework of a Collaboration for Forests and Agriculture that needs to understand the processes of transformation that take place in the territory of the Great American Chaco through the annual monitoring of land cover and use changes. In this way, it capitalizes the experience of local groups in Argentina (INTA Experimental Station Salta, Institute of Climate and Water, INTA), and Paraguay (NGO Guyra Paraguay) in satellite characterization of land cover. In 2021, Fundación Amigos de la Naturaleza (FAN) from Bolivia joined the initiative. 

MapBiomas Chaco represents a qualitative leap in the automation of processes, the generation and diffusion of spatial information of the Gran Chaco Americano. Its objective is to generate the annual maps of land cover and use for the Chaco region based on the adaptation of the methodology developed for the biomes of Brazil by the MapBiomas team.