Carlos M. Souza Jr.

• Ph.D.
• Associate Researcher at Imazon—Amazonia People and Environment Institute

We propose a new spectral index, the Normalized Difference Fraction Index (NDFI), for enhanced detection of forest canopy damage caused by selective logging activities and associated forest fires. The NDFI synthesizes information from several component fraction images derived from spectral mixture models. Interpretation of the NDFI data is facilita...

This paper shows recent progress in our understanding of climate variability and trends in the Amazon region, and how these interact with land use change. The review includes an overview of up-to-date information on climate and hydrological variability, and on warming trends in Amazonia, which reached 0.6–0.7°C over the last 40 years, with 2016 as...

The Brazilian Amazon land cover changes rapidly due to anthropogenic and climate drivers. Deforestation and forest disturbances associated with logging and fires, combined with extreme droughts, warmer air, and surface temperatures, have led to high tree mortality and harmful net carbon emissions in this region. Regional attempts to characterize la...

The Amazon underwent a severe austral springtime drought attributed to the onset of El Niño in 2023 and the warmer North Atlantic, Indian, and North Pacific Oceans. The Amazon rivers, lakes, small streams, wetlands, and reservoirs quickly lowered their water level below historical records due to decreased rainfall and warmth in the region. Based on...

In the tropics and beyond, roads are key proximate drivers of environmental impacts, including forest fragmentation, fires, mining, and land clearing. Such impacts may be amplified for the initial roads constructed in intact forests—which we term “first-cut roads”—which often promote a rash of associated secondary roads branching off the new infras...

Deforestation (the complete removal of an area’s forest cover) and forest degradation (the significant loss of forest structure, functions, and processes) are the result of the interaction between various direct drivers, often operating together. By 2018, the Amazon forest had lost approximately 870,000 km² of its original cover, mainly due to expa...

Brazil has the largest cattle herd on the planet, yet little is known about the amount of water consumed by the sector. Cattle are typically raised in extensive pasture systems containing natural and human-made small farm dams that serve as the main drinking water source. Mapping these dams and quantifying their evaporation across Brazil is a major...

State-of-the-art cloud computing platforms such as Google Earth Engine (GEE) enable regional-to-global land cover and land cover change mapping with machine learning algorithms. However, collection of high-quality training data, which is necessary for accurate land cover mapping, remains costly and labor-intensive. To address this need, we created...

Tropical forests are being disturbed by deforestation and forest degradation at an unprecedented pace (Hansen et al. in Science 342:850–853, 2013; Bullock et al. in Glob Change Biol 26:2956–2969, 2020). Deforestation completely removes the original forest cover and replaces it with another land cover type, such as pasture or agriculture fields. Gen...

This study presents our efforts to automate the detection of unofficial roads (herein, roads) in the Brazilian Amazon using artificial intelligence (AI). In this region, roads are built by loggers, goldminers, and unauthorized land settlements from existing official roads, expanding over pristine forests and leading to new deforestation and fire ho...

In this publication we present a historical overview (1980-2020) of the timber sector, with information on the dynamics of the geography of logging in the Amazon and its respective production volumes. In addition to discussing the current management and control devices in the sector. Allowing us to look back to reflect on the future and, thus, make...

This Report provides a comprehensive, objective, open, transparent, systematic, and rigorous scientific assessment of the state of the Amazon’s ecosystems, current trends, and their implications for the long-term well-being of the region, as well as opportunities and policy relevant options for conservation and sustainable development.

This Report provides a comprehensive, objective, open, transparent, systematic, and rigorous scientific assessment of the state of the Amazon’s ecosystems, current trends, and their implications for the long-term well-being of the region, as well as opportunities and policy relevant options for conservation and sustainable development.

This Report provides a comprehensive, objective, open, transparent, systematic, and rigorous scientific assessment of the state of the Amazon’s ecosystems, current trends, and their implications for the long-term well-being of the region, as well as opportunities and policy relevant options for conservation and sustainable development.

This Report provides a comprehensive, objective, open, transparent, systematic, and rigorous scientific assessment of the state of the Amazon’s ecosystems, current trends, and their implications for the long-term well-being of the region, as well as opportunities and policy relevant options for conservation and sustainable development.

Land cover maps are essential for characterizing the biophysical properties of the Earth’s land areas. Because land cover information synthesizes a rich array of information related to both the ecological condition of land areas and their exploitation by humans, they are widely used for basic and applied research that requires information related t...

The fast retreat of the tropical Andean glaciers (TAGs) is considered an important indicator of climate change impact on the tropics, since the TAGs provide resources to highly vulnerable mountain populations. This study aims to reconstruct the glacier coverage of the TAGs, using Landsat time-series images from 1985 to 2020, by digitally processing...

This chapter examines site-specific opportunities and approaches for restoring terrestrial and aquatic systems, focusing on local actions and their immediate benefits. Landscape, catchment, and biome-wide considerations are addressed in Chapter 29. Conservation approaches are addressed in Chapter 27.

Deforestation, the complete removal of an area’s forest cover; and forest degradation, the significant loss of forest structure, functions, and processes; are the result of the interaction between various direct drivers, often operating in tandem. By 2018, the Amazon biome had lost approximately 870,000 km2 of its original forest cover, mainly due...

This chapter discusses the main drivers of deforestation and forest degradation in the Amazon, particularly agricultural expansion, road construction, mining, oil and gas development, forest fires, edge effects, logging, and hunting. It also examines these activities’ impacts and synergies between them.

This Report provides a comprehensive, objective, open, transparent, systematic, and rigorous scientific assessment of the state of the Amazon’s ecosystems, current trends, and their implications for the long-term well-being of the region, as well as opportunities and policy relevant options for conservation and sustainable development.

As Amazon deforestation rates reach the highest levels observed in the past decade, it is extremely important to direct conservation efforts to regions containing preserved forests with a high risk of deforestation. This requires forecasting deforestation, a complex endeavor due to the interplay of multiple socioeconomic and environmental factors a...

Key Messages & Recommendations 1) Restoration encompasses a broad suite of objectives related to the practice of recovering biodiversity and ecosystem functions and services, such as water quality, carbon sequestration, and peoples' livelihoods. It spans aquatic and terrestrial realms, and goes beyond natural ecosystems to include the recovery of s...

Restoration can be applied in many different Amazonian contexts, but will be most effective at leveraging environmental and social benefits when it is prioritized across the Amazon basin or within landscapes and catchments. Here we outline the considerations that are most relevant for planning and scaling restoration across the Amazon.

Human activities destroy biodiversity and disrupt the functioning of aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems at different levels. This chapter provides sustainable approaches to address some of the biggest threats to the Amazon’s biodiversity and ecosystems, i.e., deforestation, damming of rivers, mining, hunting, illegal trade, drug production and traf...

Human activities destroy biodiversity and disrupt the functioning of aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems at different levels. This chapter provides sustainable approaches to address some of the biggest threats to the Amazon’s biodiversity and ecosystems, i.e., deforestation, damming of rivers, mining, hunting, illegal trade, drug production and traf...

Key Messages & Recommendations 1) Restoration encompasses a broad suite of objectives related to the practice of recovering biodiversity and ecosystem functions and services, such as water quality, carbon sequestration, and peoples' livelihoods. It spans aquatic and terrestrial realms, and goes beyond natural ecosystems to include the recovery of s...

Restoration can be applied in many different Amazonian contexts, but will be most effective at leveraging environmental and social benefits when it is prioritized across the Amazon basin or within landscapes and catchments. Here we outline the considerations that are most relevant for planning and scaling restoration across the Amazon.

Estimates of the area of land cover classes or land change are frequently calculated from land cover classification maps by counting the pixels labeled as each class in the map. This procedure is known to produce biased estimates of area for many widely used classification algorithms, including random forests. Poststratification estimation using th...

Over the past 40 years, roads have been the main driver behind the State of Acre’s occupation and development. However, the expansion of roads, has often been associated with the advance of deforestation, habitat fragmentation, and social conflicts. There are no up-to-date data available on the current extent of Acre’s road network nor its environm...

Brazil has a monitoring system to track annual forest conversion in the Amazon and most recently to monitor the Cerrado biome. However, there is still a gap of annual land use and land cover (LULC) information in all Brazilian biomes in the country. Existing countrywide efforts to map land use and land cover lack regularly updates and high spatial...

Secondary vegetation (SV) from land abandonment is a common transition phase between agricultural uses following tropical deforestation. The impact of SV on carbon sequestration and habitat fragmentation across tropical forest frontiers therefore depends on SV dynamics and demographics. Here, we used time series of annual MapBiomas land cover data...

The availability of freshwater is becoming a global concern. Because agricultural consumption has been increasing steadily, the mapping of irrigated areas is key for supporting the monitoring of land use and better management of available water resources. In this paper, we propose a method to automatically detect and map center pivot irrigation sys...

Neste documento apresentamos os procedimentos metodológicos da sétima versão do SEEG para calcular as estimativas anuais de emissões de gases de efeito estufa (GEE) no Brasil parao setor de mudança de uso da terra e florestas, no período de 1990 a 2018. O cálculo das estimativas de emissões foi baseado no método dos Inventários Brasileiros de Emiss...

Anthropogenic and natural forest disturbance cause ecological damage and carbon emissions. Forest disturbance in the Amazon occurs in the form of deforestation (conversion of forest to non‐forest land covers), degradation from the extraction of forest resources, and destruction from natural events. The crucial role of the Amazon rainforest in the h...

The rapid growth of satellites orbiting the planet is generating massive amounts of data for Earth science applications. Concurrently, state-of-the-art deep-learning-based algorithms and cloud computing infrastructure have become available with a great potential to revolutionize the image processing of satellite remote sensing. Within this context,...

Forest degradation and natural disturbance have been the primary types of forest disturbance in the Amazon between 1995 and 2017, affecting 434,500 km2(±22,100) of forest compared to 327,900 km2(±15,400) from deforestation. While forest degradation and natural disturbance cause ecological damage, biodiversity loss and carbon emissions, policies aim...

RESUMO A vegetação secundária (VS) exerce funções estratégicas para os ecossistemas atuando na fixação do carbono, manutenção da biodiversidade, manutenção do regime hidrológico e recuperação do solo. Por isso, sua proteção e monitoramento são fundamentais. Fontes de informações geoespaciais em larga escala sobre VS são poucas. Porém, duas iniciati...

A pesquisa teve como objetivo compreender a possível relação entre secularização, Estado e Ensino Profissional. No procedimento metodológico, procurou articular dialeticamente as dimensões local, estadual e nacional a respeito do ensino profissional. As fontes incluíram jornais, legislação educacional e mensagens de governadores. A análise e result...

The Brazilian Amazon is one of the areas on the planet with the fastest changes in forest cover due to deforestation associated with agricultural expansion and infrastructure development. These drivers of change, directly and indirectly, affect the water ecosystem. In this study, we present a long-term spatiotemporal analysis of surface water annua...

The human-induced changes in the earth's surface have caused significant transformations on land cover regarding the structure and functioning of ecosystems, with severe implications for the environmental sustainability and people's livelihood. Thus, our ability to detect these changes constitutes a major research challenge, in both the environment...

Mapeamento realizado pelo Instituto do Homem e Meio Ambiente da Amazônia (Imazon), identificou diversas Áreas de Proteção (AP’s) que correm risco de desmatamento por conta da expansão de imóveis rurais privados. Contraditoriamente, essa expansão está registrada no Cadastro Ambiental Rural (CAR). As informações foram levantados a partir do cruzament...

As Áreas Protegidas (APs) da Amazônia prestam inúmeros serviços ambientais em escala local, regional e continental. Entre esses serviços estão a conservação de florestas e de ecossistemas aquáticos e não florestais como savanas e campos naturais; a preservação de habitats de milhares de espécies vegetais e animais, os quais funcionam como um acervo...

Manuais escolares, mediações tecnológico-pedagógicas da Escola Moderna School textbooks, technological-pedagogical mediations of Modern School Manuales escolares, mediaciones tecnológico-pedagógicas de la Escuela Moderna Manuali scolastici, mediazioni pedagogico-tecnologiche dela Scuola Moderna

Este artigo refere-se ao Aprendizado Agrícola Borges Sampaio, instituição de ensino técnico que preparava trabalhadores para as lavouras, criada em Uberaba (MG), em 1916. Foram levantados alguns aspectos da história da instituição, tendo como referência as políticas públicas direcionadas a esta modalidade de ensino. As fontes utilizadas foram as me...

Com este estudo, buscou-se explorar os impactos da migração e da expansão educacional nos índices de analfabetismo no Brasil. No processo de desenvolvimento nacional no período de 1950-1960, a industrialização e urbanização atraíram para a cidade uma massa de população campesina que, até então, superava a população urbana, caso se considerasse o Su...

This paper introduces and tests a geostatistical spatiotemporal hurdle approach for predicting the spatial distribution of future deforestation (one to three years ahead in time). The method accounts for neighborhood effects by modeling the auto-correlation of occurrence and intensity of deforestation, using a spatiotemporal geostatistical specific...

The MapBiomas initiative was formed in 2015 by universities, NGOs, and Companies to develop a fast, reliable, and low-cost methodology to produce an annual temporal series of land cover and land use maps of Brazil from 1985 to 2017. Collection 1, which consisted of the first step of the mapping process, was done from 2008 to 2015 and only focused o...

Concerted political attention has focused on reducing deforestation, and this remains the cornerstone of most biodiversity conservation strategies. However, maintaining forest cover may not reduce anthropogenic forest disturbances, which are rarely considered in conservation programmes. These disturbances occur both within forests, including select...

Accurate tropic deforestation monitoring using time series requires methods which can capture gradual to abrupt changes and can account for site-specific properties of the environment and the available data. The generic time series algorithm BFAST Monitor was tested using Landsat time series at three tropical sites. We evaluated the importance of h...

Neste documento, analisamos as estimativas de emissões do setor de Mudança de Uso da Terra (MUT) que foram geradas pelo Sistema de Estimativas de Emissões de Gases de Efeito Estufa (SEEG) para o período de 1990 a 2013. O projeto SEEG é uma iniciativa do Observatório do Clima (OC) – uma rede de instituições da sociedade civil. As emissões do SEEG...

Although vast literature exists on the drivers of tropical deforestation and its ecological consequences, less is known about how patterns of forest fragmentation emerge in the first place. The purpose of this paper is to address this issue for the Brazilian portion of the Amazon basin by analyzing the social processes generative of five specific p...

Brazilian environmental law imposes more restrictions on land-use change by private landowners in riparian forests than in non-riparian forest areas, reflecting recognition of their importance for the conservation of biodiversity and key ecosystem services. A 22-year time series of classified Landsat images was used to evaluate deforestation and fo...

Em 2009, o governo brasileiro lançou a Política Nacional sobre Mudanças Climáticas (PNMC) para evitar o agravamento das mudanças climáticas que já vêm ocorrendo segundo o Painel Intergovernamental sobre Mudanças Climáticas (IPCC da sigla em Inglês) das Nações Unidas. A PNMC estabeleceu a meta de reduzir entre 36,1% e 38,9% suas emissões projetadas...

O governo brasileiro está executando um am¬bicioso plano de expansão de produção de energia que inclui a construção de 30 hidrelétricas (UHE) na Amazônia até 2023. Este plano e sua execução têm sido questionados em vários aspectos. Especialistas têm argumentado que parte da expansão é desnecessária, pois parte da demanda poderia ser reduzida com o...

The Brazilian tropical moist forest biome (BTMFB) is experiencing high rates of deforestation and fire. Previous studies indicate that the majority of fires occur close to roads, however they did not consider the network of unofficial roads and navigable rivers, nor inter-state and inter-annual variability. We examine 8 years of Moderate Resolution...

A sourcebook of methods and procedures for monitoring and reporting anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions and removals associated with deforestation, gains and losses of carbon stocks in forests remaining forests, and forestation

This article addresses the emergence of road networks and forest fragmentation in Central Amazônia, which has been impacted by both spontaneous and planned settlement. The first objective of the article is to broaden the discussion of fragmentation by addressing social processes that generate it through the construction of roads. Roads impact land...

Forest degradation in the Brazilian Amazon due to selective logging and forest fires may greatly increase the human footprint beyond outright deforestation. We demonstrate a method to quantify annual deforestation and degradation simultaneously across the entire region for the years 2000-2010 using high-resolution Landsat satellite imagery. Combini...

Tropical forests are diminishing in extent due primarily to the rapid expansion of agriculture, but the future magnitude and geographical distribution of future tropical deforestation is uncertain. Here, we introduce a dynamic and spatially-explicit model of deforestation that predicts the potential magnitude and spatial pattern of Amazon deforesta...

The Brazilian Amazon is a globally important ecosystem that is undergoing rapid development and land-use change. Roads are a key spatial determinant of land-use conversion and strongly influence the rates and patterns of habitat loss and represent a key component of models that attempt to predict the spatio-temporal patterns of Amazonian land-use c...

Science has a critical role to play in guiding more sustainable development trajectories. Here, we present the Sustainable Amazon Network (Rede Amazônia Sustentável, RAS): a multidisciplinary research initiative involving more than 30 partner organizations working to assess both social and ecological dimensions of land-use sustainability in eastern...

[1] We performed high-spatial and high-temporal resolution modeling of carbon stocks and fluxes in the state of Rondônia, Brazil for the period 1985–2009, using annual Landsat-derived land cover classifications and a modified bookkeeping modeling approach. According to these results, Rondônia contributed 3.5–4% of pantropical humid forest deforesta...

A demanda por informação geográfica detalhada para gestão socioambiental de municípios da Amazônia aumentou recentemente com a criação de uma lista de municípios críticos que mais desmatam as florestas da região, instituída pelo Ministério do Meio Ambiente. Duas informações são essenciais para a saída da lista crítica: o georeferenciamento de propr...

The demand for detailed land cover maps has increased in the Amazon in order to meet the requirements of the Rural Cadastral System (CAR-Cadastro Ambiental Rural), an important compliance enforced by the new Brazilian Forest Code. In order to improve the quality and the precision of CAR information, we have tested high spatial resolution RapidEye i...

Amazonia is the arena for an ongoing extraordinary transformation of nature and society. This process of change can be depicted in many ways and by various disciplines, with emphasis on the biosphere or the atmosphere, as demonstrated by the Large-Scale Biosphere-Atmosphere Experiment in Amazonia (LBA). However, the human factors behind environment...

Many tropical countries suffer from persistent cloud cover inhibiting spatially consistent reporting of deforestation and forest degradation for REDD+. Data gaps remain even when compositing Landsat-like optical satellite imagery over one or two years. Instead, medium resolution SAR is capable of providing reliable deforestation information but sho...

Tropical coastal wetlands form complex and dynamic ecosystems based on a mixture of vegetation, soil, and water components. Optical remotely sensed data have often been used to characterize and monitor these ecosystems, which are among the environments most threatened by climate change and anthropogenic activity worldwide. The present study sought...

The Brazilian Amazon is a globally important ecosystem that is undergoing rapid development and land-use change. Roads are a key spatial determinant of land-use conversion and strongly influence the rates and patterns of habitat loss and represent a key component of models that attempt to predict the spatio-temporal patterns of Amazonian land-use c...

Selective logging is a major contributor to the social, economic, and ecological dynamics of Brazilian Amazonia. Logging activities have expanded from lowvolume floodplain harvests in past centuries to high-volume operations today that take about 25 million m3 of wood from the forest each year. The most common highimpact conventional and often ille...

Monitoring tropical deforestation and forest degradation is one of the central elements for the Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in developing countries (REDD+) scheme. Current arrangements for monitoring are based on remote sensing and field measurements. Since monitoring is the periodic process of assessing forest stand...

Different deforestation agents, such as small farmers and large agricultural businesses, create different spatial patterns of deforestation. We analyzed the proportion of deforestation associated with different-sized clearings in the Brazilian Amazon from 2002 through 2009. We used annual deforestation maps to determine total area deforested and th...

Here, we test and optimise an approach to monitor and detect tropical deforestation in near-real time by comparing it with a seasonal-trend model fitted onto the historical time series. The method detects disturbances in near-real time by comparing newly acquired satellite data with a modelled stable period based on historic satellite time series d...