MapBiomas

The Project

WHAT IS THE INICIATIVE MAPBIOMAS ECUADOR 

The "Annual Land Cover and Land Use Mapping in Ecuador" Project is an initiative that involves a collaborative network of land use, remote sensing, GIS and programming experts. 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 land use in Ecuador.

ORIGIN

The Instituto Ecociencia is the Ecaudorian member of the Red Amazónica de Información Socioambiental Georreferenciada (RAISG), where this type of information is generated in coordination with the other countries of the Amazon basin, to achieve the same objectives. Since 2009, within the framework of the work of RAISG, the generation of deforestation maps of the Ecuadorian Amazon began, applying increasingly advanced satellite data processing tools. In search of new alternatives for the automation of processes and the generation of information for longer intervals, in March 2017, the RAISG, in agreement with the General Coordination of MapBiomas Network, created the MapBiomas Amazonía initiative, of which Ecociencia is a member.


As part of the work with RAISG and MapBiomas, Ecociencia has achieved the Second Collection of Annual Maps of Coverage and Land Use for the entire Ecuadorian territory for the period 1985 - 2023. Thanks to this collaborative effort it will be possible to have these maps in an interactive platform for the MapBiomas Ecuador.

PURPOSE

To contribute to the understanding of land use dynamics in Ecuador based on:

  • The development and implementation of a rapid, reliable, and low-cost methodology to generate annual maps of land cover and land use, from 1985 to the present (updating annually).
  • Creation of a Web platform to facilitate the dissemination of the methodology and access to the results: Products and By-products.
  • Establish a collaborative network of specialists in the different biomes for mapping land cover and land use and its dynamics of change.

CHARACTERISTICS OF THE INITIATIVE

  • Collaborative work with other institutions to optimize solutions.
  • Distributed and automated data processing in partnership with Google Earth Engine.
  • Generation of an open and replicable platform.
  • Collaborative platform designed to incorporate contributions from the scientific community and others interested in collaborating.