We are a network of NGOs, Research Institutions and Technological Startups that produce and promote the use of qualified information for the administration of land use and land cover in South America and other tropical and subtropical regions.

As a network, we are committed to generating data, methods, tools and information to qualify the understanding, analysis and decision-making on conservation and sustainable management of continental natural resources.

MapBiomas Chaco is an initiative that arises as a continuation of the initiative in Brazil that integrates a collaborative network of specialists from Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Bolivia, 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 land cover and land use maps of the American Gran Chaco.

MapBiomas Chaco involves researchers and specialists in remote sensing, GIS, computing, biomes, and land use from each of the participating countries (Argentina, Paraguay, and Bolivia). The Argentine team is coordinated from INTA, Paraguay's through GUYRA and Bolivia's from FAN. The teams work in coordination processing the information in the cloud through the Google Earth Engine platform.

The maps can be downloaded directly on the platform through the link: Collection Maps

Don't forget to download the legend codes at: [ Download ]

It is also possible to download the data directly from Google Earth Engine when specific territorial or temporal breaks are needed.

In Google Earth Engine it is possible to access all the data of the Landsat Mosaic and the transition maps. To obtain the IDs of the MapBiomas Chaco collections in Google Earth Engine, access: [ Assets ]

MapBiomas Chaco land cover and use maps (30m pixels) and long time series are impractical in vector format. All project processing is done in raster format, pixel by pixel.

There is no such possibility on the MapBiomas Chaco platform. Vectorization of maps is extremely expensive and impractical for the entire territory. The recommended solution, if you want to work with vector, is to download the data, carry out the territorial or spatial clipping of your interest and then vectorize with your favorite software.

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

Yes, the MapBiomas Chaco collections are available as layers (assets) on the Google Earth Engine platform and can be accessed, processed and analyzed directly on the platform without the need to download the data. To get MapBiomas Chaco collection IDs in Google Earth Engine, go to:  LINK

MapBiomas Chaco data is public and free, simply referring to the source in the following format:

“Chaco MapBiomas Project – Collection [version] of annual land cover and use maps, which can be accessed on [date] through the link: [LINK]“.

“The MapBiomas project – is a multi-institutional initiative to generate annual land use maps based on automatic classification processes applied to satellite images. The full description of the project can be found at https://chaco.mapbiomas.org/proyecto“

It is necessary to have a Google Earth Engine (GEE) account, which can be generated through the following link: https://earthengine.google.com

When accessing the GEE Code Editor (https://code.earthengine.google.com) can start scripts to view and process data. In the link you will find examples of scripts to access the MapBiomas Chaco data in Google Earth Engine. LINK

The detailed description of the legend with its corresponding code (raster) is available for download at: LINK

Yes, the land cover and use statistics, as well as the transition matrices for the biomes (Gran Chaco and Yungas Argentina), countries, province/departments, departments/municipalities/districts are available for download at: https://chaco.mapbiomas.org/statistics/

On the MapBiomas Chaco platform maps are available and ready to download clipped by Biomes. To download by political level 1 (province/department) or political level 2 (districts/department/municipalities), they can be generated with Google Earth Engine, accessing the scripts available in the Link. You need to select the political level and years of interest and export them to your Google Drive folder.

Landsat has an average resolution of 30 m, so it is common to associate the area of a pixel with 900 m². But, since the original data of MapBiomas Chaco is created following the representation of the GEE standard (Lat/Long and WGS84), it does not use an equivalent projection (equal area). Therefore, the distance from the target to the equator influences the pixel size. Therefore, on a continental scale, calculation of pixel count and multiplication by 900 m2 should be avoided.².

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

You can access the description of all the reference maps used by MapBiomas Chaco at: LINK