We are a network of NGOs, research institutions and tech startup that produce and promote the use of qualified information to stewardship the land use and land cover in South America and other tropical and subtropical regions. 

As a network, we are committed to generate data, methods, tools and information to qualify the understanding, analysis and decision-making on conservation and sustainable management of continental natural resources.

MapBiomas Trinational Pampa is an initiative that emerged as a continuation of the initiative in Brazil that involves a collaborative network of specialists from Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay, in 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 maps of land use and cover in the South American Pampa biome.

MapBiomas Trinational Pampa involves researchers and specialists in remote sensing, GIS, informatics, biomes and land uses in each of the participating countries (Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay). The team from Brazil includes the Rio Grande do Sul University (UFRGS, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul) and GeoKArten. In Uruguay, the team includes the University of the Republic (UR, Universidad de la República), the National Institute of Agricultural Research (INIA, Instituto Nacional de Investigación Agropecuaria) and the Ministry of Environment (Ministerio de Ambiente). Finally the team from Argentina includes the National Institute of Agricultural Technology (INTA, Instituto Nacional de Tecnología Agropecuaria), the Institute of Applied Mathematics of the University of San Luis (IMASL, Instituto de Matemática Aplicada de la Universidad de San Luis), the University of Buenos Aires (UBA, Universidad de Buenos Aires) and Fundación Vida Silvestre (FVSA). The teams work in coordination by processing the information in the cloud through the Google Earth Engine platform.

The maps can be downloaded directly on the platform through the link: [ Collection Maps ]

Do not forget to download the legend codes in: [ Download ]

It is also possible to download the data directly from Google Earth Engine when specific territorial or temporary breaks are needed.

In Google Earth Engine it is possible to access all Landsat Mosaic data and transition maps. To obtain the IDs of the MapBiomas Trinational Pampa collections in Google Earth Engine, access: [ Assets ]

The MapBiomas Trinational Pampa land cover and use maps are produced through pixel-by-pixel processing of Landsat images (with 30 m pixels) of long time series, with all project processing being in raster form

There is no such possibility in the MapBiomas Trinational Pampa platform. The vectorization of maps is extremely expensive and impractical for the whole territory. The recommended solution, if you want to work with vectors, is to download the data, make the territorial or spatial cut of your interest and then vectorize with your favorite software.

Yes, the MapBiomas Trinational Pampa data is public and free for non-commercial use or for public interest purposes.

Yes, the MapBiomas Trinational Pampa collections are available as layers in the Google Earth Engine platform and can be accessed, processed and analyzed directly on the platform without the need to download the data. To obtain the IDs of the MapBiomas Trinational Pampa collections in the Google Earth engine, go to: [LINK]

It is necessary to have an account in Google Earth Engine (GEE), which can be created through the following link: https://earthengine.google.com

By accessing the GEE Code Editor (https://code.earthengine.google.com) you can start scripts to view and process data. In this link you will find examples of scripts to access the MapBiomas Trinational Pampa data in Google Earth Engine. 

The data of MapBiomas Trinational Pampa are public and free, simply referring to the source in the following format:

“MapBiomas Trinational Pampa Project – Collection [version] of the annual maps of land cover and land use, accessed at 2024 through the link: [LINK]. 

The MapBiomas Trinational Pampa project is a multi-institutional initiative to generate annual land use maps based on automatic classification processes applied to satellite images. The complete description of the project can be found at https://pampa.mapbiomas.org/ “

The detailed description of the legend with the correspondent code (raster) is available for download at: LINK

Yes, land use and land cover statistics, as well as transitional matrices for the biomes Pampa Sudamericano y Espinal, as well as the Delta del Paraná, countries, states, and departments are available for download at: Statistics

Inside the MapBiomas Trinational Pampa platform, the maps are available and ready to use, clipped by Biomes. For states and municipalities subsets, it can be generated inside Google Earth Engine, by accessing the script available at link. You must select the state and county and years of interest and export it to your Google Drive folder.

Landsat has an average resolution of 30m, so it is common to associate the area of ​​a pixel to 900 m2. But, since the original MapBiomas Trinational Pampa data is created following the GEE standard representation (Lat/Long and WGS84), it does not use a native equal-area projection. Thus, the distance from the target to the Equator Line influences the pixel size. Therefore, in the continental scale area, calculation counting the pixels and multiplying by 900 m2 should be avoided.

In MapBiomas Trinationall Pampa the calculation is performed within Google Earth Engine. We apply the function ee.Image.pixelArea() that generates an image in which the value of each pixel is the area of that pixel in square meters, taking into consideration occasional cartographic distortions.

You can access the description of all the reference maps used by MapBiomas Trinational Pampa at: Reference Maps