The current Project’s main objectives are to quantify sources or sinks of greenhouse gases and study the control processes that regulates those emissions in Amazon – GEE-AMAZONIA, and develop algorithms and data analytic methods, statistics, and Artificial Intelligence systems, composing a Service Information System.
The system will be installed in the cloud and integrated with automated data acquisition.
Land use and land-use changes are the largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions in Brazil. Most of the processes that control these emissions and sinks are in the Amazon region.
This project aims to quantify GHG sources and sinks in the Amazon and the drivers that control the carbon balance, with a focus on CO2 and CH4. Temperature, solar radiation, cloud cover, water vapor, large-scale meteorology, and human impacts are mainly responsible for the changes in GHG flows in the Amazon. It is essential to understand the non-linear and complex relationship between these variables. Changes in land use, especially deforestation, are responsible for the largest GHG emissions in Brazil. In 2020, about 11,088 km² of primary forests were deforested according to INPE’s PRODES system.
We intend to integrate several existing tools and develop new knowledge about the processes that control the GHG balance in Amazon. That includes the integration of new remote sensing data systems and technologies such as NASA and EU satellite measurements, with OCO-2 (Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2), GOSAT (Greenhouse gases Observing SATellite), ESA’s Sentinel satellite constellation (European Space Agency), TROPOMI (TROPOspheric Monitoring Instrument) among others.
We will operate NASA’s solar photometers network at various Amazon locations, called the Aerosol Robotics Network – AERONET, which measures aerosol particles, black carbon, and column water vapor.
The LBA experiment (Large Scale Biosphere and Atmosphere Experiment in the Amazon) and ATTO tower (Amazon Tall Tower Observatory) are operating several forest fluxes towers in Amazon measuring GHG concentrations and fluxes at the forest level.
There are also GHG flux towers in other Amazonian countries. Data generated by them will be integrated with INPE products for deforestation, biomass burning, and forest degradation, such as PRODES (Monitoring System for Deforestation of the Brazilian Amazon Forest by Satellite), DETER (Deforestation Detection System in Real-Time), Queimadas Project, TREES, among others.
Also, it will include data of land-use changes generated by MapBiomas, and data about secondary forests and their dynamics over the years. This integration will allow for the adequate calculation of net GHG emissions and/or removals in the Amazon.
The project will also develop a new quantitative methodology to evaluate forest degradation in the GHG emissions framework. Using the MapBiomas platform, we will incorporate data on GHG emissions and removals from the forest and changes in land use in the Amazon at high resolution, allowing for comprehensive territorial analyses based on deforestation activities and land tenure and land-use patterns.
All these data will be synthesized and integrated into an evolutionary Service Science platform capable of managing demands in this area from all researchers worldwide. It will also provide algorithms and data analysis packages based on various statistical methods, decision system Bayesian, in “knowledge graphs,” and techniques that allow researchers direct access to the results of the models and GHG balance measures.
A multidisciplinary data analysis system will be developed based on Data Science, Artificial Intelligence, and Service Science, facilitating the complex and multidimensional visualization of the generated data and its sharing. Management will be based on the analysis of service systems and managed by the project team. Finally, the group will explore automation techniques for data collection in the Amazon rainforest and remote sensing using robotic devices.