MapBiomas

The Project

What is MapBiomas Uruguay?

MapBiomas Uruguay is an initiative focused on topics such as land use, satellite remote sensing, GIS and programming. Our objective is to understand the processes of transformation that take place in the uruguayan territory through the annual monitoring of land cover and land use changes. 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 Uruguay. 

ORIGIN

MapBiomas Uruguay starts in January 2020 as part of the MapBiomas Pampa project, which integrates previous work in the Pampa region of Brazil and incorporates participants from Uruguay and Argentina with the goal of generating a unified map of the entire South American Pampa region. In Uruguay are participating Universidad de la República, Instituto Nacional de Investigación Agropecuaria (INIA) and Ministerio de Ambiente. MapBiomas Uruguay represents a qualitative leap in the automation of processes, the generation and diffusion of spatial information of the country. Its objective is to generate the annual maps of land cover and use for the entire country, as well as the South American Pampa biome region, based on the adaptation of methodologies developed for the biomes of Brazil by the MapBiomas team.

PURPOSE

  • Contribute to the understanding of land cover and use dynamics in uruguayan territory, based on the development and implementation of a fast, reliable and low-cost methodology to generate annual maps of land cover and use, from 1985 to the present (and then updating annually). 
  • Creation of a web platform to facilitate the dissemination of the methodology and access to results: Products and Sub-products.
  • Establish a collaborative network of specialists in the countries to map land use and cover and dynamics of change.

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 multipillable platform.
  • Collaborative platform designed to incorporate and welcome the contributions of the scientific community interested in collaborating.