Starting in 2017, new Mennonite colonies began appearing in the Peruvian Amazon, coming from other parts of Latin America in search of new lands. TheMennonites, a global religious group dating back to the 1600s, often require vast tracts of land to support their characteristic large-scale, industrialized agricultural activity. In a series of reports, we have demonstrated […]
The Amazon fire season is well under way: to date, we have detected over 260 major fires thus far in 2023 (see Base Map below). This year is of special concern because scientists indicate we have entered a new El Niño episode. The most intense Amazon fire seasons on record, 2016 and 2017, immediately followed […]
We present a detailed look at the major 2022 Amazon forest loss hotspots, based on the final annual data recently released by the University of Maryland (and featured on Global Forest Watch). This dataset is unique in that it is consistent across all nine countries of the Amazon, and distinguishes forest loss from fire, leaving the rest as […]
Gold mining continues to be one of the main causes of deforestation in the southern Peruvian Amazon, especially in the Madre de Dios region. Here, we provide a comprehensive look at the most recent (2021-2022) gold mining-related deforestation in the area, combining two important types of data for the first time: Deforestation within the Mining […]
As deforestation continues to threaten primary forest across the Amazon, key land use designations are one of the best hopes for the long-term conservation of critical remaining intact forests. Here, we evaluate the impact of two of the most important: protected areas & indigenous territories. Our study looked across all nine countries of the Amazon biome, a vast […]
Gold Mining is one of the major deforestation drivers across the Amazon. Although not typically at the scale of agricultural deforestation, gold mining has the potential to severely impact critical areas such as protected areas & indigenous territories. Relatedly, gold mining often targets remote areas, thus impacting largely intact and carbon-rich primary forests. Here, for […]
Gold mining is one of the major deforestation drivers across the Amazon, with well-known cases in Peru, Brazil, and Venezuela. In a recent series of technical articles*, in collaboration with the Ecuadorian organization Foundation EcoCiencia, we have also shown that gold mining is escalating in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Here, we summarize the results from the series and […]
The Brazilian government recently launched a series of raids against illegal gold mining in Yanomami Indigenous Territory, located in the northern Brazilian Amazon (see inset of Base Map). These raids highlight the severe consequences brought by illegal mining activity, particularly deforestation, contamination, malnutrition, and disease. Here we present the results of a new machine learning […]
We continue with the second part in our series on soy deforestation in the Bolivian Amazon. In the first part, see MAAP #179, we documented the massive soy-driven deforestation of 904,518 hectares (2.2 million acres) between 2001 and 2021 in the Bolivian Amazon. During this time period, a large number of farming-based Mennonite colonies have […]
It is generally known that commodities such as oil palm, soy, and cattle are major tropical deforestation drivers, but concise estimates are often difficult. New satellite-based datasets are improving this situation. Notably, researchers recently published the first overview of soybean plantations for South America.1 Here, we use this data to estimate recent soy-driven deforestation in […]
