RAMI, Radar Imaging Satellite Mining Monitoring in Spanish, is a geospatial technology tool developed to monitor illegal gold mining in the Peruvian Amazon.
Planet-NICFI base maps are publicly available through Program Level 0 in RAMI (https://rami.servirglobal.net/), which serves users who want to "track illegal gold mining associated with forest conversion" in Madre de Dios in Peru.
The tool provides mining alerts with a 15-day frequency and uses Sentinel-1 radar imagery in the Google Earth Engine database. In addition, the platform relies on monthly basemaps available from NICFI to interpret and validate the alerts.
The implementation of RAMI since June 2021 has reinforced the Peruvian government's objective to fight against the loss of forest cover due to illegal gold mining. This activity causes deforestation of the Peruvian Amazon, loss of ecosystems and contamination of local water sources due to toxic runoff from the mercury used to extract gold.
Recent satellite monitoring by the platform indicates that deforestation by informal mining in the territory of indigenous communities in Madre de Dios has increased. The September 2-27 report promoted by the Association for the Conservation of the Amazon Basin (ACCA) indicates that in some areas, the loss of forest cover due to informal mining within indigenous communities were detected.
Click here to check out the press release in Spanish done by Grupo Stakeholders SAC
