Detecting Deforestation

Using geospatial technologies to better understand the changing environment

Illegal gold mining in the Amazon

Twenty years of gold mining in the Peruvian Amazon has negatively affected local communities and ecosystems. The destructive mines leave behind a barren, mercury-polluted landscape. Using high-resolution satellite imagery, geospatial data, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, organizations can detect, monitor and assess deforestation caused by illegal gold mining in the Madre de Dios region of Peru.

Understanding the environment

Over the last two decades, significant change has occurred in Madre de Dios, a sparsely populated tropical forest region of Peru near the Brazilian border.

Finding Recent Change

See where change is occurring in the Peruvian Amazon with Persistent Change Monitoring (PCM). PCM is designed to isolate human-made changes that persist over time and to filter out sources of transient and seasonal cyclical changes, such as seasonal leaf-on/leaf-off dynamics or growing seasons.

Zeroing in on areas of interest

The change indicators in dark red point to disturbances that took place in 2019. These are locations where mining operations expanded considerably in Madre de Dios. Analysis of the attribute data contained within PCM confirms that between 2000 and 2019 approximately 90,000 hectares of lowland tropical forest were deforested.

Change-driven satellite tasking

Maxar uses PCM data to quantify and qualify areas of change as an integral part of driving our product strategy to source where and when imagery needs to be updated, increasing value for our customers.

Using AI to keep up with change

We used PCM to identify where our Vivid Standard product required updates in Madre de Dios. We tasked our high-resolution optical satellites to capture new imagery in September 2020. Maxar offers up to 30 cm native resolution imagery, delivering clearer, richer images that enable better detection.

Updating geospatial assets

BaseVue LULC, Maxar's moderate-resolution global land use/land cover dataset, provides a foundational understanding of the landscape that is necessary to perform land use inventories, resource monitoring, management and planning activities—at local, regional, national and global scales—while PCM aids in identifying and prioritizing areas where updates to geospatial databases are needed most.

Finding the right mapping solution

The sizes and skills of GIS teams vary greatly. As the source, Maxar offers a range of solutions from do-it-yourself imagery access to automated change detection and GIS-ready datasets.