FAQ

We are a network of NGOs, Research Institutions and Technological Startups that produce and promote the use of qualified information for land use and land cover management 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 Trinational Atlantic Forest emerges as a continuation of the initiative in Brazil that involves a collaborative network of experts from Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay on 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 use and cover maps of MapBiomas Trinational Atlantic Forest.

MapBiomas Trinational Atlantic Forest involves researchers and specialists in remote sensing, GIS, computing, biomes and land uses from each of the participating countries (Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay). The Argentine team is coordinated by Fundación Vida Silvestre Argentina, the Brazilian team by ArcPlan and the Paraguayan team through WWF Paraguay. The teams work in a coordinated way processing the information in the cloud through the Google Earth Engine platform.

The maps can be downloaded directly on the platform by clicking here.

Do not forget to download the legend ID’s as well: LINK.

It is possible to download data directly from Google Earth Engine and fit your request to specific territories or temporal windows. In Google Earth Engine you can also access all Landsat Mosaics and transition maps. To get MapBiomas Trinational Atlantic Forest collections ID's in Google Earth Engine, go to:Google Earth Engine.

Land use and land cover maps made on the MapBiomas scale (30m pixel) and large time series are impractical in vector format. All data processing is performed in raster format, pixel by pixel.

There isn’t such possibility in the MapBiomas Trinational Atlantic Forest platform. The vectorization of maps is extremely costly and impractical for the whole territory. The recommended solution, if you want to work with vector, is to download the data, perform the territorial or spatial clipping of your interest and then vectorize using your favorite software.

Yes, the MapBiomas Trinational Atlantic Forest data is public and free for non-commercial use or for public interest purposes.

Yes, the MapBiomas Trinational Atlantic Forest collections are available as layers in the Google Earth Engine platform and can be accessed, processed and analyzed directly on the platform without the need to download the data. To obtain the IDs of the MapBiomas Chaco collections in the Google Earth engine, go to: Google Earth Engine.

MapBiomas Trinational Atlantic Forest data is public and free of charge by merely referring to the source in the following format:

"MapBiomas Trinational Atlantic Forest Project - Collection [number] of the Annual Land Use Land Cover Maps, accessed on [date] through the link: [LINK]. MapBiomas Trinational Atlantic Forest Project - is a multi-institutional initiative to generate annual land use land cover maps based on automatic classification processes applied to satellite images (...)"

The complete project description can be found at here.

You must have a Google Earth Engine (GEE) account, which can be registered through the following link: https://earthengine.google.com. By accessing the GEE Code Editor (https://code.earthengine.google.com), you can start scripts to view and process data. In this link you can find examples of Scripts to access MapBiomas Trinational Atlantic Forest data in Google Earth Engine. 

Yes, the land cover and use statistics, as well as the transition matrices for the Trinational Atlantic Forest biome, country, basin, province / state, departments and municipalities / districts are available for download at: Statistics.

The file with the caption codes can be accessed at LINK.

In the MapBiomas Trinational Atlantic Forest platform the maps are available ready to download with Biomas clipping. For states and municipalities subsets, it can be generated inside Google Earth Engine, by accessing the script available at this link. You must select the state and county, years of interest and export it to your Google Drive folder. 

You can access the description of all the reference maps used by MapBiomas Trinational Atlantic Forest in: Reference Maps.

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 MapBiomas Trinational Atlantic Forest data 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, the pixel count calculation and multiplication by 900 m2 should be avoided.

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