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[Fire Crackling]

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[onscreen text] Tracking Amazon Deforestation

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[Music]

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[Doug Morton] The Amazon is the largest tropical rainforest
in the world. At over six million square kilometers  

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the Amazon basin and the tropical forests that 
it holds, are about the same size as the entire  

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continental United States. Home to millions 
of people and tens of thousands of species.  

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Landsat is NASA's longest-running record of our 
changing planet. Data have been taken from Landsat  

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satellites since 1972, and that allows us to 
go back in time over several very important  

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decades. The Landsat archive is perfectly timed 
to capture many different waves of colonization  

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across the Amazon. 

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[Tasso Azevedo] It's very powerful in this sense
because it's not just an image.

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It's actually a bunch of information. What happens 
with Landsat is that it has several bands which  

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have specific information. So pixel by pixel 
you have at least seven pieces of information that  

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can be combined in different ways to see different 
things. So if you are interested to see vegetation  

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there is one combination that you make that 
can give you more information about vegetation.  

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[Doug] Landsat satellite data are the most important 
source we have about how much deforestation  

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happens each year across the Amazon. 40 years 
ago we see small-scale deforestation creating  

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roads that look like fish bones into the forest. 
But by the middle of the Landsat record, we see  

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large-scale commodity production taking hold. So 
today's deforestation across the Amazon frontier  

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isn't a single-family, it's tractors and bulldozers 
clearing large swaths of rainforest to make room  

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for industrial-scale cattle ranching and 
crops. So far the amount of area that's  

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been deforested in the Brazilian Amazon alone is 
equivalent to the size of the state of California.  

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Deforestation in the Amazon happens with 
fire. Today's deforestation looks like the  

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large-scale clearing of swathes of rainforest, 
using heavy machinery; and then the land is burned  

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and burned again to remove all of the tropical 
trees and timber.

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If we think about the size of a soccer field, we think about deforestation 
in those same size categories. So deforestation  

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in the early part of the Landsat record might 
have been numbered in a single soccer field.  

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Today's deforestation happens in 
tens if not hundreds of soccer fields.

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The value of the Landsat archive is that we have  

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a long-term memory of the changes that 
have occurred across the Amazon frontier.

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And the MapBiomas record of land cover 
across the Amazon is an excellent example.

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[Tasso] So MapBiomas is a network, formed by NGOs
that works with science universities and startups  

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in technology. Our mission is to map and monitor 
everything that is related to land cover, land use  

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in Brazil, always with a historical perspective.
Because back in '75, 0.5% of deforestation,  

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less than one percent. In '88 was 5% and now we are getting close to 20%

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of deforestation in the Amazon. You know between 
20% and 25% what the science is saying that it's  

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maybe the point of no return. And that's very fast, 
right? 40-45 years to lose 20% of the Amazon. 

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So we could precisely identify how many events of 
deforestation happen in Brazil, or what's the size,  

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who is responsible, what is the piece of land 
that is there, if they have an authorization  

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or not. And we find out that over 99% of all the 
deforestation that happened in Brazil in 2019,  

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it was illegal. It's really kind of a striking 
information that make us to move and say, "Okay we  

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can't accept, we just simply can't accept that we 
live on a place where the illegality is actually  

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the norm." Right? So this is like the type of thing 
that we want to kind of use the remote sensing  

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data to kind of shake in the decision-making 
process of the different agencies in the public  

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and in the private sector. To make better decisions 
for what we call the stewardship of the management  

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of our natural resources which are crucial for all 
reasons in Brazil.

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The advantage of Landsat. 
First, it's free.   

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That's absolutely crucial for us. Second, is that 
there's no other sensor, not even with lower  

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resolution, or high resolution, that will have a 
history consistent over the time for 35 years  

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of image available. 

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So, if you really want to have a long history 
of understanding of any process in the Earth,

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Landsat is where you should go.

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[Doug] Without Landsat we would not have 
the record we have today,

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about deforestation, and changing agriculture 
across a vast and important biome.  

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We anticipate the launch next year of Landsat 9, 
which will carry on the legacy of this data record,  

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allows us to go back in time, and understand 
how our planet has changed over 40 years.

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[Music]

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[onscreen text] [NASA logo] USGS science for a changing world.
Landsat is a joint program of NASA and USGS