A forecast identified Triunfo do Xingu, in Pará, as the Environmental Protection Area (APA) with the highest risk of deforestation in 2023, with 271 km² of forest in the conservation area to be lost by the end of the year. Now the imazon is now establishing partnerships with authorities across the region, with the aim of stop deforestation before it starts.
ADVERTISING
The idea of forecast appeared in 2016. Tired of receiving notifications after large areas of forest had already been deforested, the team at imazon asked himself: it is possible to generate deforestation prediction models in curto term?
“Existing deforestation prediction models were long-term, looking at what would happen in decades,” says Carlos Souza Jr, senior researcher at imazon and project coordinator forecast and SAD, to the Guardian (*). “We needed a new tool that could anticipate the devastation.” Souza and his team – a computer engineer, a geostatistics consultant and two researchers – began developing a new model capable of generating annual forecasts. They published their findings in the journal Spatial Statistics (🇬🇧) in August 2017.
How does PrevisIA work?
The model adopts a two-pronged approach. First, focuses on current trends in the region, analyzing geostatistics and historical data from Prodes, the annual government system for monitoring deforestation in the Amazon. Understanding what happened can help you make more accurate predictions. When already deforested areas are recent, this indicates that gangs are operating in the area, so there is a greater risk that the nearby forest will be wiped out soon.
ADVERTISING
In second place, analyzes the variables that slow deforestation – such as lands protected by indigenous and quilombola communities and areas with bodies of water that do not lend themselves to agricultural expansion – and also variables that make deforestation more likely, including greater population density, presence of settlements and rural properties and greater infrastructure density road traffic, both legal and illegal.
So far, the imazon has official partnerships with some state prosecutors, who hope that the use of forecast lead to less punishment and more prevention. The tool should work from the second half of 2023.
@curtonews Can artificial intelligence help save the Amazon? Discover the Imazon tool that predicts deforestation. 🌳
♬ original sound – Curto News
Read also
(🇬🇧): content in English
(*): Content in other languages translated by Google Tradutor
(🚥): may require registration and/or subscription
* The text of this article was partially generated by artificial intelligence tools, state-of-the-art language models that assist in the preparation, review, translation and summarization of texts. Text entries were created by the Curto News and responses from AI tools were used to improve the final content.
It is important to highlight that AI tools are just tools, and the final responsibility for the published content lies with the Curto News. By using these tools responsibly and ethically, our objective is to expand communication possibilities and democratize access to quality information. 🤖
ADVERTISING
