NASA Earth Observatory image modified by SkyTruth
Increasing Remote Monitoring Capacity in Areas of the Peruvian Amazon
SkyTruth has been training the Peruvian Park Service, Servicio Nacional de Áreas Naturales Protegidas por el Estado (SERNANP) to use SkyTruth Monitor to more accurately and efficiently detect and address environmental concerns within the Amazon Basin.
The Amazon Basin is a richly biodiverse region spanning several South American countries including Peru, where the country’s national park service, Servicio Nacional de Area Naturales Protegidas por el Estado (SERNANP) is charged with monitoring various environmental activities that threaten to degrade Peru’s natural environment – such as illegal gold mining.
SERNANP is responsible for establishing the technical and administrative criteria for the conservation of protected natural areas within Peru, and safeguarding the maintenance of biological diversity while making natural areas more widely available to everyday Peruvians.
The area that SERNANP is tasked with monitoring is vast and oftentimes covered in rough, difficult-to-navigate terrain, making each excursion highly resource and manpower intensive. Due to the isolated nature of many of these areas, having a way to identify and triage potential incidents remotely increases the team’s capacity to monitor the full area with increased accuracy and timeliness.
Mining in Huepetuhe relies on heavy machinery to tear through the vegetation and topsoil. Only mounds of dirt and gravel remain. Credit: SkyTruth
In 2020, SkyTruth received support from Conservation X Labs to develop ‘Project Inambari’ – a free, publicly available map that monitors and detects gold mining activity. As satellites collect new imagery over the monitoring region, SkyTruth automatically updates the map to enable near-real time monitoring, with monthly basemaps from Planet available to visually verify illegal mining events.
SkyTruth project manager Bjorn Bergman worked closely with SERNANP to develop this tool to meet their needs, which included monitoring illegal gold mining activity within the Peruvian Amazonia. SERNANP was able to upload independent drone footage to compare to the satellite imagery and confirm suspected activity before deciding on an intervention strategy.
Since then, our work together has expanded to include helping SERNANP use SkyTruth Monitor to track various environmental issues including wildfire burn rate and spread, incursions on remote protected areas, agricultural clearing activities (e.g., clearing for access roads, deforestation), and illegal gold mining.
After agricultural burning in the reeds along the shore of Lake Titicaca, in Peru’s high Andes, got out of control, SERNANP was able to use spectral indices from SkyTruth Monitor to measure the spread of the burn and to better visualize the impacted area, providing key evidence of the environmentally damaging activity for any future legal action pursued.
To ensure a broad range of users in the Peruvian Amazon can take advantage of the tool, SkyTruth has hosted two in-person, Spanish-language training sessions to over a hundred personnel and community members. In these training sessions, SkyTruth helped attendees identify the most relevant datasets to their work and understand how to interpret satellite imagery, as well as how to upload private data sets like independent drone footage.
We continue to work with conservation advocates in the Amazon basin and around the world to provide detailed intelligence on the environmental crises they face, helping them deploy their limited resources to maximum effect. The result: helping to scale collective efforts, building a network of organizations and tools to prevent the illegal destruction of critical habitats, and supporting the success of conservation efforts.
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