![]() ![]() ![]() That made it much easier to remove or apprehend equipment. Rather than doing random patrols and checking for permits, rangers would send squads of enforcement officers - with satellite images in hand - to investigate areas of recent, suspicious activity. “DETER completely changed the way rangers went about enforcement work,” said Rajão. By 2011, the system was sending alerts within a day. When DETER was first set up, it sent deforestation alerts to enforcement officers within two weeks. Though the image quality was lower, the daily coverage allowed forest monitors to identify some newly cleared areas in near-real time. While PRODES collected Landsat images once every few weeks and deforestation totals were updated once per year, DETER made use of daily observations of deforestation, fire, and vegetation health from lower-resolution sensors ( MODIS) on NASA’s Terra and Aqua satellites. “That move toward transparency and accountability proved crucial because it made it possible for the science community, NGOs, and the public to engage,” said Rajão.Ī second satellite-based system, DETER, went into operation in 2004 and further advanced the cause. ![]() In 2002, with public outrage about deforestation growing, INPE began posting the full dataset online, complete with deforestation maps for all of the Brazilian rainforest. Scientists at Brazil’s national space agency (INPE) used that data to calculate how much rainforest was being clear-cut each year in the Legal Amazon.įor more than a decade, PRODES data was mostly kept within government labs and agencies. In 1998, the government established a data-collection system called PRODES, based on Landsat 5 and 7 observations. Satellite-based forest monitoring systems played a key role in slowing deforestation, explained Raoni Rajão, an expert in environmental policy at Federal University of Minas Gerais. The turnaround was heralded as one of the world’s most dramatic environmental success stories. By 2012, forest clearing was down nearly 80 percent, or roughly 5,000 square kilometers (1,900 square miles) per year. Within a few years, large-scale deforestation dropped by roughly 50 percent. The government created a large network of national and state parks, established protected territories for indigenous groups, strengthened environmental enforcement agencies, made it more difficult to export goods produced on illegally deforested land, and strengthened satellite monitoring systems. That was the year the Brazilian government adopted an aggressive policy called the Action Plan for the Prevention and Control of Deforestation in the Legal Amazon (PPCDAm). In 2004, following several years of particularly rapid deforestation, public pressure turned the tide. “Ranchers, soy farmers, land speculators, loggers, and miners were coming to the frontier and clearing virtually anything they wanted.” “It was open season on the rainforest back then,” said Michael Coe, a senior scientist with the Woods Hole Research Center. Scientists have used satellites to track the deforestation of the Amazon rainforest for several decades - enough time to see some remarkable shifts in the pace and location of clearing.ĭuring the 1990s and 2000s, the Brazilian rainforest was sometimes losing more than 20,000 square kilometers (8,000 square miles) per year, an area nearly the size of New Jersey. Please read part 1, part 2, and part 4 for a more complete picture of Amazon deforestation. Your browser does not support the video tag.Įditor’s Note: This story is the third part in a series. ![]()
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