Workshop Continues Vital Work to Protect Peru’s Natural Protected Areas
Supporting efforts to use Monitor as a platform for protected area managers
Peru is home to spectacular natural protected areas, stretching from its arid Pacific coastline to the high peaks of the Andes and down to the dense Amazon rainforest. The protected areas are overseen by the Servicio Nacional de Áreas Naturales Protegidas por el Estado (SERNANP), Peru’s agency for managing natural protected areas. SkyTruth has worked with SERNANP since the 2020 launch of Project Inambari, which monitors Amazon gold mining, and assisted with regular staff training sessions on the Monitor platform since then. Last month, we were pleased to be invited to participate in a workshop on satellite imagery held by SERNANP’s Subdirectorate of Strategic Information and Natural Protected Area Investigation (SIEI).
Monitor is a versatile analysis tool that brings together satellite imagery and data layers for easy comparison of imagery from different sources and time periods. This makes it possible to investigate emerging threats to protected areas from logging, mining, and the opening of informal road networks. Spectral indices, or ratios of spectral bands, from the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-2 satellites also enable monitoring vegetation changes and wildfire burn scars. Users can upload their own datasets to Monitor, including SERNANP’s high-resolution drone imagery, allowing for detailed custom analysis.
The remote sensing team from SIEI presented to 61 park staff at SERNANP’s workshop and shared different methods of accessing and analyzing satellite imagery. In addition to SkyTruth’s Monitor platform, the team demonstrated how to access imagery from Peru’s Earth observation satellite, PeruSat, and how to use open source programs like QGIS. During the Monitor presentation, SERNANP’s Maria Miyasiro demonstrated how to analyze a recent burn scar and changes in vegetation with Sentinel-2 spectral indices. See the clips below for her Monitor demonstrations.
It’s been exciting to see how Monitor has been incorporated into SERNANP’s daily analysis workflow. We look forward to continuing to support their efforts and to improving Monitor as a platform to protect natural areas in Latin America and around the world.
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