The Mennonites, a religious group often associated with organized agricultural activity, have started three new colonies in the Peruvian Amazon. We have documented the deforestation of 8,500 acres (3,440 hectares) in these three colonies over the past four years (updated October 2020). The...

The southern Peruvian Amazon (Madre de Dios region), is threatened by illegal mining, logging, and illegal deforestation. In response, an association of forest concessionaires (known as ACOMAT) is implementing a comprehensive monitoring system that links the use of technology (satellites and drones) with legal...

We have detected 120 major fires this year in the Bolivian Amazon, as of the first of October (see Base Map).* The majority of these fires (54%) occurred in savannas, located in the department of Beni. Another 38% of the major fires were...

Illegal logging in the Peruvian Amazon is mainly selective and, until now, difficult to detect through satellite information. In this report, we present the enormous potential of very high resolution satellite imagery (<70 cm) to identify illegal logging. The leading entities that offer...

We have documented 1,650 major fires in the Brazilian Amazon this year, and well over half (60%) have occurred in September.* We have been detecting around 62 major fires a day during September, relative to 18 in August (and 2 in July). Moreover,...

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...