2020 marked an important 5-year milestone in our partnership with the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad) to build government and community capacity for real-time deforestation monitoring and to combat illegal deforestation in Peru. Building on the trust and expertise we established over our 20-year history, we helped the forest service, prosecutors, and police agencies […]

On August 4, attendees at our webinar Fires in the Amazon: What You Need to Know in 2021 learned what to expect during this year’s intense fire season and the implications for climate change, indigenous peoples, and protected areas. Real-time monitoring experts, scientists, and local organizations witnessing the impact of the Amazonian fires shared their […]

Washington, DC, July 27, 2021. A new analysis by Amazon Conservation’s Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project (MAAP) shows that protected areas and indigenous territories offer the best defense against deforestation for the Amazon Rainforest. Through Amazon Conservation’s latest Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project (MAAP) analysis, the organization studied how land use designations in […]

The Madre de Dios region of Peru has long been home to a variety of cultural and ethnic groups for nearly three thousand years. The Indigenous Federation of Madre de Dios (FENAMAD in Spanish) is a regional organization that represents 37 indigenous communities belonging to seven linguistic groups. With the support of the Norwegian Agency […]

Last year (2020), we demonstrated the power of our real-time Amazon fire monitoring app (see MAAP #118 and MAAP #129). In a novel approach, the app uniquely combines data from the atmosphere (aerosol emissions in smoke) and the ground (heat anomaly alerts) to quickly and precisely detect major Amazon fires.* Using the app, we just detected the first two major fires in the Brazilian […]

Our real-time satellite monitoring efforts recently discovered that deforestation across the nine countries of the Amazon reached an all-time high in 2020. Over 5.6 million acres of irreplaceable forests were lost, an increase of 17% over 2019. The effects of this rampant deforestation are many: loss of habitat and potential extinction of wildlife species, increased […]

1) Know What’s at Stake As an ecosystem, the Amazon is one of the most biodiverse places on earth. Over 3 million species live in the rainforest, and over 2,500 tree species (or 1/3 of all tropical trees that exist on earth) help create and maintain this vibrant ecosystem. More and more, biodiversity is at risk. There’s a reason why […]

An image provided by the International Space Station has been circulating around the internet showing an aerial view of cascading ‘rivers of gold’ in the Peruvian Amazon. These fascinating ‘rivers’ are in fact destructive and toxic pits that form as a result of illegal gold mining activities. Though these pits are a common sight for […]

Even in a year as unexpected and uncertain as 2020, our supporters have continued to show up when we’ve needed you most. So this Giving Tuesday we’re not asking for you to lend us hand with a financial contribution (although, of course, we always welcome donations to make conservation happen!), but we’re asking you to […]