Case Study: MapBiomas achieves 10x faster nationwide 30‑m land‑use and deforestation mapping with Google Cloud Platform

MapBiomas Mapping and monitoring the world’s most biodiverse country

MapBiomas is a coalition of universities, NGOs and tech partners formed to map and monitor land use across Brazil’s six biomes. Facing rapidly changing land-use patterns, high deforestation rates and limited research budgets, the group needed annual, national-scale 30‑meter land cover maps back to 1985—something that traditional visual interpretation of Landsat imagery did slowly and expensively (years and millions of dollars per map).

By adopting Google Earth Engine and Google Cloud Platform, MapBiomas automated machine-learning classification of billions of Landsat pixels and scaled processing and collaboration tools for its 20+ partner organizations. The result: maps produced at least 10× faster and at a fraction of previous costs, democratized access to land-use data for municipalities and researchers, faster deforestation detection, and a nationwide historical record (1985–present) that informs policy, local action and regional replication.

MapBiomas

Tasso Azevedo

General Coordinator