New Data from MAAP Reveals Key Patterns of Crops & Cattle Pasture
July 31, 2024
Agriculture has become one of the leading causes of deforestation across the Amazon. As MAAP has continued to closely monitor its impacts, a burst of new data and online visualization tools are revealing key land use patterns across the Amazon, particularly regarding the critical topic of agriculture. MAAP #214, merges and analyzes these new datasets to provide our first overall estimate of Amazonian land use, the most detailed effort to date across all nine countries of the biome that zooms in on three key regions to show the data in greater detail:
The Eastern Brazilian Amazon, Andean Amazon (Peru and Ecuador), and Northeast Amazon (Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname, French Guiana).
These new datasets include:
- Crops. The International Food Policy Research Institute, with support from WRI’s Land & Carbon Lab, recently launched the latest version of their innovative crop monitoring product, the Spatial Production Allocation Model (SPAM), featuring spatial data for 46 crops.
- Cattle pasture. The Atlas of Pastures, developed by the Federal University of Goiás, facilitates access to data regarding Brazilian cattle pastures generated by MapBiomas.
The Base Map above illustrates the following major findings:
1) Crops
40 crops in the SPAM dataset overlap with the Amazon, covering over 106 million hectares (13% of the Amazon biome).
Soybean covers over 67.5 million hectares, mostly concentrated in southern Brazil and Bolivia. Relatedly, maize covers 70 million hectares, often as a secondary rotational crop with soy.
Oil palm covers nearly 8 million hectares, concentrated in eastern Brazil, central Peru, northern Ecuador, and northern Colombia.
Cocoa and coffee are concentrated in the Andean Amazon zones of Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia (8 million and 6.7 million hectares, respectively).
Other major crops across the Amazon include rice (13.8 million hectares), sorghum (10.9 million hectares), cassava (9.8 million hectares), sugarcane (9.6 million hectares), and wheat (5.8 million hectares).
2) Cattle Pasture
Cattle pasture covers 76.3 million hectares (9% of the Amazon biome). The vast majority (92%) of the pasture is in Brazil, followed by Colombia and Bolivia.
3) Crops + Cattle Pasture
Overall, accounting for overlaps between the data, it is estimated that crops and pasture combined cover 115.8 million hectares.
This total is the equivalent of 19% of the Amazon biome. For comparison, open-pit gold mining covered 1.9 million hectares (0.23% of the Amazon biome).