WHAT IS THE MAPBIOMAS CHILE INITIATIVE

The "Annual Land Cover and Land Use Mapping in Continental Chile" project is an initiative that involves a collaborative network of specialists from various Chilean universities on topics such as land use, satellite remote sensing, GIS and programming. It uses cloud processing and automated classifiers developed and operated from the Google Earth Engine platform to generate a historical series of annual land cover and land use maps for Chile.

PURPOSE

- To contribute to the understanding of land use dynamics in continental Chile, based on the development and implementation of a fast, reliable and low-cost methodology to generate annual land cover and land use maps, from the year 2000 to the year 2022 (to be updated annually).

- Creation of a web platform to facilitate the dissemination of the methodology and access to the results: Products and By-products.

- Establish a collaborative network of specialists in different countries for mapping land cover, land use and change dynamics.

CHARACTERISTICS OF THE INITIATIVE

• Networking with the responsible institutions in the different countries.
• Distributed and automated data processing through an alliance with Google Earth Engine.
• Work oriented to generate an open and repicable platform.
• Collaborative platform designed to incorporate and welcome contributions from the scientific community interested in collaborating.

ORIGIN

MapBiomas Chile starts in January 2023 as a continuation of the MapBiomas Brazil project, seeking to understand the transformation processes occurring in the continental territory of Chile, through annual monitoring of land cover and land use. In this way, it capitalizes on the experience of several Chilean universities (Universidad de Chile, Universidad de Concepción, Universidad de la Frontera and Universidad de Magallanes) in the characterization of diverse land cover and land use through the use of satellite images. The MapBiomas Chile initiative represents a qualitative leap in the automation of processes, generation and dissemination of spatial information at a transboundary level. Its objective is to generate annual land cover and land use maps for the entire region based on the adaptation of the methodology developed for the Brazilian biomes by the MapBiomas team.