In 2021, scientists and journalists got together to train an artificial intelligence model on how to detect gold mines in the Amazon. One year later, they launched Amazon Mining Watch, a tool capable of using satellite imagery to identify the scars left by miners in the rainforest. Designed by the Pulitzer Center’s Rainforest Investigations Network, the NGO Amazon Conservation, and Earth Genome, one of the main challenges of the initiative was the inevitable cloud obscuring images of the rainforest. “[Cloud cover] means that it’s hard to get clear views of what’s happening on the ground,” Edward Boyda, from Earth Genome, told Mongabay. “We look across the whole set of those images, 50 or so per year, and from those we collect the cloud-free ones.” The endeavor was a success, but the picture they gained isn’t good. According to the methodology, the area occupied by gold mines across the entire Amazon doubled from 2018 to 2023, going from 963,000 to 1.9 million hectares (2.4 million to 4.7 million acres). Researchers from the Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project (MAAP) analyzed the data and concluded that most of the mines are located in Brazil (55%) — not surprising since the country accounts for 60% of the entire biome. However, the activity is pervasive in other countries, like Guyana, which accounted for 15% of the total mining areas, Suriname (12%), Venezuela (7%) and Peru (7%). Journalists and scientists used artificial intelligence to track gold mines in the Amazon Rainforest. Image courtesy of the…This article was originally published on Mongabay
The post Gold mining in the Amazon has doubled in area since 2018, AI tool shows first appeared on EnviroLink Network.