MapBiomas is the initiative of a collaboration network made up of non-governmental organizations, universities and companies worldwide, whose objective is to use quality and low-cost technology (e.g. satellite images and cloud computing) to produce a series of annual maps from 1985 onwards.

MapBiomas Ecuador is an initiative coordinated by EcoCiencia, and created together with the Amazonian Network of Geo-referenced Socio-environmental Information (RAISG) and MapBiomas Network. Its objective is to generate annual land cover and land use maps for Ecuador (1985 onwards), based on the methodology developed in Brazil by the MapBiomas Network team.

MapBiomas Ecuador involves researchers and specialists in remote sensing, informatics, ecosystems, and land use from the country. All work is done using cloud computing through the Google Earth Engine platform.

The land use land land cover maps and Landsat mosaics can be downloaded through the following link: https://ecuador.mapbiomas.org/descargas/

In this link you will find a tool in Google Earth Engine that allows the download of the complete collection, as well as the download by specific territorial or temporal slices. 
If you have any doubts, follow the steps that are explained in this tutorial: https://youtu.be/pFDohJcYFy4

Don't forget to download the legend codes at: https://ecuador.mapbiomas.org/en/codigos-de-la-leyenda/

The downloaded files are images with multiple bands (or layers). Each band represents one year of the time series. For example, in Ecuador’s Collection 2.0, layer 0 = 1985 and layer 38 = 2023.

Large time series of land cover and land use maps generated at the scale that MapBiomas Ecuador works (30 m pixels) are not practical in vector format. All data processing is done in raster format, pixel by pixel. 

There is no such possibility on the MapBiomas Ecuador platform. Map vectorization is extremely expensive in terms of computational resources and impractical for the whole territory. The recommended solution, if you want to work with vector, is to download the data, make the territorial or spatial cutout of your interest and then vectorize with your preferred software.

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

Yes, the MapBiomas Ecuador collections are available as layers (assets) in the Google Earth Engine platform and can be accessed, processed and analyzed directly on the platform without the need to download the data.

The IDs of the public assets are:

Integration. -

projects/mapbiomas-public/assets/ecuador/collection2/mapbiomas_ecuador_collection2_integration_v1

Transitions. -

projects/mapbiomas-public/assets/ecuador/collection2/mapbiomas_ecuador_collection2_transitions_v1

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 Ecuador data in Google Earth Engine: https://code.earthengine.google.com/mapbiomas-toolkit

MapBiomas Ecuador data are public and free, you can make use of them by simply referring to the source with the following format: 

“MapBiomas Ecuador Project - Collection [number] of the Annual Land Cover and Land Use Series for Ecuador, acquired [date] through the link: [LINK]”
"MapBiomas Ecuador Project - is an initiative of EcoCiencia with the multi-institutional co-creation of RAISG to generate annual cover and land use maps from automatic classification processes applied to satellite images." The full description of the project can be found at http://ecuador.mapbiomas.org“

The detailed legend description with the correspondent code (raster) is available for download at:

https://ecuador.mapbiomas.org/en/codigos-de-la-leyenda/

Yes, land use land cover statistics, as well as transition matrices for the country, biomes, regiones, provinces and districts are available for download at: 

https://ecuador.mapbiomas.org/en/estadisticas

To download the data by region of province, they can be generated with Google Earth Engine, accessing the scripts available at the link. You must select the region, the province, the years of interest and export it to your Google Drive folder. Toolkit: Land Use and Coverage Maps

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

In MapBiomas Ecuador we apply two methods to calculate the area:

1 - When performed outside Google Earth Engine, we reproduce the MapBiomas Ecuador datum for the UTM system and calculate the metric value of the central pixel, located at the intersection between the reference 1: 250,000 chart and the area of interest. Then, we count all the pixels within the area of interest and multiply by the reference value, in m², of the central pixel previously calculated. 

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

You can access the description of all the reference maps used by MapBiomas Ecuador at: https://ecuador.mapbiomas.org/en/mapas-de-referencia