PROMISING ADVANCES OF AMAZONIAN MONITORING SYSTEMS THROUGHOUT VANGUARD TECHNOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE

Abstract

PRODES and DETER project together turned 33 years-old with an undeniably contribution to the state-of-art in mapping and monitoring tropical deforestation in Brazil. Monitoring systems all over the world have taken advantage of big data repositories of remote sensing data as they are becoming freely available together with artificial intelligence. Thus, considering the advent of new generation remote sensing data hubs, online platforms of big data that can fill in spatial and temporal resolutions gaps in current deforestation mapping, this work aims to present recent innovations at INPE´s deforestation monitoring systems in Brazil and how they are gauging new realms of technological levels. Recent innovations at INPE´s monitoring systems are: 1) the development of TerraBrasilis platform of data access and analysis; 2) the adoption of new sensors and cloud detection strategies; 3) the complementary use of multi-sensor images; 4) the complementary adoption of SAR C-band images using cloud data to sample and process Sentinel-1. Future innovations are: 1) development of a Brazilian data cube to be used in deep learning techniques of image classification; 2) Routine uncertainty analysis of PRODES data. Automatization might fasten mapping process, but the real challenge is to succeed in automatization maintaining data quality and historical series. The hyper-availability of remote sensing data, the initiative of a Brazilian Data Cube and promising machine learning techniques applied to land cover change detection, allowed INPE to reinforce its central role in tropical forest monitoring.