The “Land Cover and Land Use Annual Mapping Project of Argentina”  brings together specialists from the country's different ecoregions in fields such as remote sensing, ecology, geographic information systems (GIS), and programming. Our focus is on producing annual maps of land cover and land use in Argentina from 1998 onwards. We are a growing collaboration network among NGOs, universities, and research institutes.

OUR PURPOSE

To unveil the transformations of Argentine territory through science, with precision, agility, and quality, making knowledge about our territory's land cover and land use accessible. We aim to enhance decision-making processes in areas such as conservation, sustainable natural resource management, and adaptation and mitigation to climate change.

INITIATIVE FEATURES

• Networked collaboration with academic, environmental, and civil society institutions from various regions of the country.
• Decentralized and automatic data processing in the cloud through a partnership with Google Earth Engine.
• Creation of an open platform to facilitate the dissemination of methodology and access to results for various user profiles.
• Collaborative platform designed to incorporate and receive contributions from the scientific community and other interested user profiles.

ORIGIN

The project began in our country in 2017, alongside Bolivia and Paraguay, as Argentina initiated mapping of the Gran Chaco Americano , and its inaugural collection was published in 2020. In 2019, in collaboration with Paraguay, Brazil, and Uruguay, mapping expanded to the regions of the  Atlantic Forest and the Pampas, with the first collections published in 2021. With over half of the country mapped, a national-level initiative was consolidated in August 2023, aiming to understand transformation processes across the entire territory using remote sensors and capitalizing on the experience of local groups in Argentina.

MapBiomas Argentina represents a qualitative leap in automating processes, generating and disseminating spatially explicit information about Argentine territory openly, freely, and at no cost. Its goal is to produce annual collections of land cover and land use maps for the entire country based on the local adaptation of the methodology developed in Brazil in 2015, which is periodically updated. Additionally, the platform provides users with codes, technical reports, and protocols used in generating information, ensuring process transparency. The platform offers statistics and graphics to facilitate access for different audiences.