MONITORING AND ALERTING LAND USE AND LAND COVER CHANGE FOR DECISION-MAKING USING EARTH OBSERVATIONS

It can be difficult to target early action mitigating the impact of land cover changes across the vast Amazon biome. Improved methods for detecting and monitoring change are increasingly in demand given the impacts of formal and informal economic development. SERVIR exemplifies how integrating regional expertise across scales of influence is crucial to developing trusted decision-support tools. Two near-real time applications by SERVIR-Amazonia improve detection, monitoring, and validation of change by integrating the most up-to-date space agency data and from the people living on the changed land. In Pará, Brazil, TerraOnTrack visualizes deforestation, degradation, fires, and other changes in the landscape to disseminate alerts for potential illegal activities to and from users. A second tool, the Amazon Fire Dashboard not only improves the differentiation of deforest, understory forest, savanna, and smallholder/agricultural fires, but calculates the respective carbon emission of individual fire detections. By knowing the fire source and driver regional firefighters can appropriately plan for taking action in even the most hard to reach fires based on type, size, and spread over time. Targeted alert-to-action pipelines, specifically for rural and Indigenous communities help protect both forest and people and can lead to legal action to potential threats, and territorial zoning.