The Venezuelan government makes it practically impossible to fly in Southern Venezuela, so we wanted to create a virtual flyover of the Venezuelan Amazon to show the areas affected by illegal gold mining activity in the upper Caroní River basin. 

We partnered with VE360 to make the video. The SOSOrinoco team to selected and downloaded Planet-NICFI monthly basemaps in the Basemaps viewer on the Planet Explorer web. Using the free program QGIS and a computer capable of handling the nearly 90GB of data, the team made 5 mosaics, representing close to 50,000km2 of real-world terrain. 

One of the problems we encountered was the selection of the appropriate images due to the high cloud cover in the basin, which could only be achieved with the monthly mosaics that present images with the least amount of cloud cover possible, since they are a summary of the best daily PlanetScope images. We used the layer of mining activities surveyed in this basin to date by SOSOrinoco using Planet Explorer images.

With these mosaics, SOSOrinoco and VE360 teams collaborated on an animation of the Caroní River, and then cut it to include only the sector of interest; the next step involved the use of a Geographic Information System (ArcGIS) software to load the layers of the river basin, the mining footprint made by SOSOrinoco, country boundaries, and the Orinoco Mining Arc. To complete the animation, we traced the “flyover route” to illustrate the depth of the destruction.