As deforestation continues to threaten primary forest across the Amazon, key land use designations are one of the best hopes for the long-term conservation of critical remaining intact forests. Here, we evaluate the impact of two of the most important land use designations:...

Illegal gold mining is a widespread problem in the southern Peruvian Amazon (Madre de Dios region), where it has caused river contamination and the deforestation of more than 100,000 hectares. This activity has also emerged in the northern Peruvian Amazon (Loreto region), where...

Illegal logging, in addition to larger-scale deforestation, is a major problem impacting the Peruvian Amazon. In 2019, a Global Witness report, based on official information from the Peruvian government, estimated that at least 60% of the inspected timber over the past 10 years...

We have documented 24 major fires in the Brazilian Amazon thus far in 2021 (as of June 29), based on our unique real-time Amazon fire monitoring app, In 2020, we demonstrated the power of the app, documenting over 2,500 major fires across the...

Last year (2020), we demonstrated the power of our real-time Amazon fire monitoring app (see MAAP #118 and MAAP #129). In a novel approach, the app uniquely combines data from the atmosphere (aerosol emissions in smoke) and the ground (heat anomaly alerts) to quickly...

MAAP, an initiative of Amazon Conservation, specializes in satellite-based, real-time deforestation monitoring of the Amazon. Our geographic focus covers five countries: Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru (see Base Map). We found that, since 2001, this vast area lost 65.8 million acres (26.6...

As part of our ongoing coverage, we present two key new findings about the Brazilian Amazon fires that captured the world’s attention in August (see our novel satellite-based methodology below). First, we found that many of the fires, covering over 450,000 hectares, burned...

For the 100th MAAP report, we present our first large-scale western Amazon analysis: Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, and western Brazil (see Base Map). We use the new 2018 data for forest cover loss, generated by the  University of Maryland (Hansen et al 2013)...

MAAP, an initiative of the organization Amazon Conservation, uses cutting-edge satellite technology to monitor deforestation in near real-time in the megadiverse Andean Amazon (Peru, Colombia, Ecuador, and Bolivia). The monitoring is based on 5 satellite systems: Landsat (NASA/USGS), Sentinel (European Space Agency), PeruSAT-1, and the companies Planet and DigitalGlobe. For more information about our...

************************************************************************************************** Science Magazine: Combating deforestation: From satellite to intervention Full text Reprint (PDF): *Note: The article can only be viewed for free via this author page. ************************************************************************************************ A new policy article entitled “Combating deforestation: From satellite to intervention” was just published in Science, one...

When tropical forests are cleared, the enormous amount of carbon stored in the trees is released to the atmosphere, making it a major source of global greenhouse gas emissions (CO2) that drive climate change. In fact, a recent study revealed that deforestation and...