WHAT IS THE MAPBIOMAS TRINATIONAL ATLANTIC FOREST INITIATIVE

The Project “Annual Mapping of Land Use and Land Cover (LULC) of the Trinational Atlantic Forest” is an initiative that involves a collaborative network of specialists from Argentina, 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 Trinational Atlantic Forest.

PURPOSE

• Contribute to the understanding of Land Use and Land Cover dynamics in the Trinational Atlantic Forest, based on the development and implementation of a fast, reliable and low-cost methodology to generate annual maps of LULC, from 1985 to the present (and then updating annually).
• Creation of a web platform to facilitate the methodology dissemination and results access: Products and Sub-products.
• Establish a transnational collaborative network of specialists to map LULC change and its dynamics.

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 replicable platform.
• Collaborative platform designed to welcome and incorporate the scientific community contributions.

ORIGIN

MapBiomas Trinational Atlantic Forest starts in November 2019 as a follow up of the MapBiomas Brazil project within the framework of the Conservation of the Jaguar habitat, seeking to understand the transformation processes that occur in the territory of the triple border from the annual monitoring of the coverage and land use. In this way, it capitalizes on the experience of local groups in Argentina (Institute of Subtropical Biology of CONICET, Faculty of Agronomy of the UBA, Faculty of Forest Sciences-UNAM an Fundación Vida Silvestre Argentina), Brazil (ArcPlan and SOS Mata Atlântica) and Paraguay ( WWF Paraguay) in the satellite characterization of land cover. MapBiomas Trinacional Atlantic Forest represents a qualitative leap in the automation of processes, the generation and dissemination of spatial information at the transboundary level. Its objective is to generate annual land cover and use maps for the entire region based on the adaptation of the methodology built for the Brazilian biomes by the MapBiomas team.