Tropical Mosaics

INVEMAR has benefited from Planet data in various projects, including mangrove restoration, disaster assessment (post-hurricane Julia) in mangroves and seabeds, and mapping mangrove cover in specific areas of the country. As for the viewer tools they created, daily images and monthly Planet mosaics have been used to analyze the temporal dynamics of coastal marine ecosystems such as mangroves. The products have been collected in ArcGIS Pro and QGIS and processed in GEE to improve the scale of some current developments. Among the projects for which the NICFI Satellite Data Program continues to contribute are mangrove restoration monitoring with the Colombian Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development (MADS), ecosystem-based adaptation for protection against coastal erosion in a cha

Indigenous peoples and local communities are essential to preserving and protecting the world's lands and ecosystems. Because of their reliance on and intimate contact with the environment and its resources, they are among the first to experience the direct effects of climate change (UN, 2007). The importance and potential of including their knowledge and expertise are vital to developing and implementing national policies and agendas to support the proposed Sustainable Development Goals (IPCC AR6). 

In recent years, the effects of droughts, aggravated by climate change, have increased in frequency and magnitude, affecting people's livelihoods and food security. Therefore, the "Crowdmapping for Food Security in the Horn of Africa" program aims to address this issue by using cutting-edge technology and community mapping to create an early warning system in Ethiopia’s Lowe Omo Valley. Marcos Moreu, a researcher at UCL, explained the science behind FEWS NET (Famine Early Warning Systems Network) in a blogpost. The tool's main goal is to assist land users in producing terrestrial data so that maps combining satellite and user-generated data from the ground can be more locally relevant. This concept incorporates NICFI Basemaps, allowing participants to localize, on and off-site, the state of resource

African Parks is an NGO that helps in the rehabilitation and long-term management of national parks in partnership with governments and local communities. They manage national parks and protected areas in 12 countries, including Angola, Benin, the Central African Republic, Chad, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Malawi, Mozambique, the Republic of Congo, Rwanda, South Sudan, Zambia and Zimbabwe. You can check out the organization’s website. In the NICFI Survey carried out in November 2022, they noted they use NICFI Basemaps in GEE to monitor the protected area landscapes they manage in the Central African Republic and Mozambique. More specifically, NICFI basemaps are central to developing a deta

CONAFOR, a NICFI level 2 user, uses NICFI Basemaps through QGIS and GEE. They adjusted their workflow so that calibration processes of change detection are performed in PS images. Additionally, they evaluate deforestation alerts for monitoring specific change processes such as settlements and illegal airstrips. Another use of individual Planet imagery is to conduct tests to understand possible underestimates of forest cover loss due to the spatial resolution of Sentinel 2 imagery. For this purpose, they have run change detection algorithms in different images to check the best performance. Finally, they mentioned they have also consumed planet images through the Google Earth Engine tool to generate exploratory change analysis.Here

This week, we’re going to Brazil! Since 2019, deforestation in Brazil has reached record levels. Even only in 2021, more than 13,000 sq km of the Brazilian Amazon were cleared. This was the highest total in 15 years. According to projections, total deforestation will reach almost 15,000 sq km by 2022.InfoAmazonia and PlenaMata examined Planet-NICFI basemaps from 2018 to 2022 and focused on critical areas that helped illustrate how the previous government had a destructive effect on the Amazon.You can check out this link

Next, for Earth Day this month , we will go to Ethiopia, where a NICFI user is using data to pursue NICFI Strategic Objectives 3 "Effective international incentive structures to reduce deforestation in tropical forest countries" and 4. "Increased transparency in land management, land use, value chains and finance". The Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) reported on their work in the November 2022 survey. With NICFI program data products, including Planet Scope mosaics and Planet Daily images, they conduct visual validation of deforestation alerts, land use/land cover analysis and report on potential drivers of deforestation (e.g., agricultural, illegal logging, mining or natural causes) in Ethiopia.They stream and use the data in Google Earth Engine, QGI

For this month's earth day we will report on user stories from around the world and how they use NICFI maps in their workflow.In this first story, we’re going to Indonesia, where Astraea in collaboration with The Nature Conservancy are developing pond and mangrove analyses. They are studying mangrove distribution and canopy cover under the Mangrove Ecosystem Restoration Alliance (MERA) program and other programs that require analysis of this critical ecosystem.Being part of user level 2, the experts explain that they use single images (for small areas) and create mosaics themselves if they need a large area containing a lot of scene data. However, for the use of base maps, these are downloaded for quick validation

You can read the NICFI Satellite Data Program Quarterly Reports here. Go to the page and scroll down to see all available reports! 😊  

The Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project (MAAP), run by Amazon Conservation Association, was launched in 2015. The project delivers actionable data from multiple satellite sources for local governments and people to detect deforestation. It currently covers 83% of the Amazon in Peru, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador and Bolivia. This week’s user story is about deforestation in the southern Peruvian Amazon, where gold mining is one of the critical reasons for deforestation in the region. The last status of deforestation in the Mining Corridor of Madre de Dios was highlighted in the MAAP article published in December 2022.  As agriculture is another reason for deforestation in the area, the researchers distinguished mining deforestation. Using NICFI-Planet monthly mosaics, they

Guatemala's National Forest Institute (INAB) uses Planet NICFI data to complement its forest assessment and offer Forest Incentives. This system reinforces the National Forestry Incentives System that has existed for over 20 years.Their activities include the use of NICFI Basemaps in GEE for mapping forest cover of Pinabet (Abies guatemalensis) coniferous and broadleaf species in Western Guatemala for the year 2020 and to map the dry forest in Guatemala in 2020 and analyze the areas of change (losses and gains) in 8 municipalities for the period 2018-2020-2022. You can have a look at their results at the following link.

If you are interested in learning digital tools for more effective forest and land monitoring, FAO organizes an online course to provide knowledge and skills for application of high resolution satellite imagery in tropical forest countries.  The main focuses will be the SEPAL platform, its functions and applications as well as processes and systems for forest and land monitoring. The course will be simultaneously delivered in English, French and Spanish. Click here to register the course.  

A recent study conducted in a natural reserve in the Tumbes-Chocó-Magdalena biodiversity hotspot in Ecuador has highlighted the importance of using satellites to estimate tropical forest diversity. In the study called “Ensemble Machine Learning for Mapping Tree Species Alpha-Diversity Using Multi-Source Satellite Data in an Ecuadorian Seasonally Dry Forest”, researchers used LiDAR models of the forest canopy from the GEDI mission, combined with RapidEye, Sentinel 2 images, topographic models and field data (tree species, stem diameter and height).This study informs the relationship between SDTF tree diversity and remotely sensed data in southwestern Ecuador using mixed sensor t

We are pleased to announce that NICFI Basemaps are included in the Felt catalog.Felt is a collaborative mapping application that serves a wide range of use cases. Recently, NICFI Basemaps has been included in their portal, and through their interface, users can select NICFI Basemaps, deploy as a custom map background and get ready to work.We aim that this integration can be helpful for forests' sustainability worldwide.Here, you can read more about NICFI in Felt

Amazon Conservation's January 8 post focused on the problems associated with mining activity in the southeastern part of the Ecuadorian Amazon. This report develops an analysis of the Podocarpus National Park, located between the Amazon and Andean zones and holds extraordinary biodiversity and endemism.  Amazon Conservation uses NICFI Basemaps to map and highlight illegal gold mining activities that threaten this diversity. They identified 22 sites where mining activity was detected from 2021 to 2022, providing evidence that such activity continues to increase every year. In addition, this organization publishes reports on various cases of deforestation and illegal mining in the Amazon. If you are interested in reading this or more reports, follow this

Featured on this show is Tara O’Shea, the Senior Director of Forest and Land Use at Planet. Tara shares how Planet and other partners have come together under NICFI’s (Norway’s International Climate and Forest Initiative) satellite data project to make high resolution satellite data available for tropical forest monitoring systems and researchers across the world.Click here to listen to the show!

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Being one of the countries with the most forest area, India has lost 80% of forest land due to rapid economic development and overuse of local resources. Aiming to help India’s government and industries and protect the existing resources, scientists developed a deep learning system that produces real-time monthly land use and land cover maps for India’s forests through satellite imagery data. This research was presented at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting 2022. The researchers trained the land use monitoring system through Planetscope images provided by NICFI Satellite Data Program. Then, they combined NICFI data with a global land cover map created by Tshinghua University. Their deep learning model could provide ten basemaps of the area from January to October 2022. With t

Each year, World Resources Institute publishes ‘Forest Pulse’ to cover forest loss worldwide and carry out extensive research on the topic. Through NICFI Data available on Global Forest Watch, this year’s report gives essential insights into how much/where forests were lost in 2021.  Key Findings from Forest Pulse 

The need for high-resolution data in African savanna landscapes can complicate mapping land cover types. The NICFI Satellite Data Program provides free imagery to help users map these regions in detail.Recent publications highlight the benefits of using high-resolution satellite imagery and machine learning algorithms as powerful tools for mapping land cover types in data-sparse landscapes. The research titled “A super-ensemble approach to map land cover types with high resolution over data-sparse African savanna landscapes” uses the NICFI Basemaps and Sentinel 1 images to create land cover maps. By analyzing the spectral characteristics of the vegetation and using machine learning algorithms, they improved land cover maps over sparse landscapes, such as those found in Tanzania. The r

Some users in the community have been experimenting with multiple options to use technology and data to monitor reforestation activities, and even running hackathon-type challenges on this topic! Below are two examples that included the Planet-NICFI basemaps - check them out! I would love to hear your thoughts on these ideas!Omdena's Monitoring Reforestation Success using Machine LearningFruitPunch AI's Can AI track reforestation projects using drone and satellite data?

Colombian Mining Monitoring (CoMiMo) aims to detect illegal mining using satellite data and machine learning. To do this, they created a geospatial tool to observe illicit mining activities in Colombia. CoMiMo uses Planet-NICFI base maps publicly available through the NICFI Program as Level 0 Users. The default imagery in the app is Planet NICFI Basemaps, and the predictions are generated with this imagery. The mining sites were detected based on the paper titled “The response of illegal mining to revealing its existence”. In this research, Santiago Saadevra aims to see the impacts of sharing location data of illegal activity with government officials in Colombia. The researcher created a novel dataset

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 f

AidEnvironment creates Real Time Deforestation Monitoring Reports to fight production-related deforestation and support civil society. Their August report highlighted seven case studies in Brazil with a continuing deforestation case from Mato Grosso, using NICFI Data. These cases contain the current deforestation activities regarding soy and cattle production in a total of 17,172 hectares of logging of native vegetation and 560 fire alerts in the Amazon and Cerrado biomes.Their methodology uses satellite imagery to analyze deforestation and fire alerts for each case study. Then, AidEnvironment analyzed the cases through their database and addition