Palikur - Space Apps Challenge

Palikur| Spot That Fire V3.0

Spot That Fire V3.0

Recent wildfires worldwide have demonstrated the importance of rapid wildfire detection, mitigation, and community impact assessment analysis. Your challenge is to develop and/or augment an existing application to detect, predict, and assess the economic impacts from actual or potential wildfires by leveraging high-frequency data from a new generation of geostationary satellites, data from polar-orbiting environmental satellites, and other open-source datasets.

ECOAGRO

Summary

EcoAgro is a platform where farmers and ranchers can access data related to economic losses generated as a result of the expansion of the agricultural industry. The idea is for the platform to provide accessible, profitable and sustainable feedbacks (agroforestry systems, reforestation, green manure) for these farmers and ranchers, in order to exemplify them with other, more profitable options.

How We Addressed This Challenge

We have developed a platform aimed mainly at farmers and ranchers, which contains information on sustainable cultivation, economic harms of deforestation in the Amazon forest, aiming at replacing the technique of burning forest areas for sustainable management of the affected area.

Through the platform, we will have a relationship between the conscious and responsible use of natural resources and the economy, as there will be a visualization of the economic benefits with sustainable land management, thus it will be realized that the sustainable medium is more profitable in the medium and long term , and the number of land destruction with justification for economic evolution will decrease (increase in Gross Domestic Product).

The platform analyzes and correlates data from satellites, deforestation and fires, with economic productivity, that is, the productive potential of such a region with what is currently produced. Furthermore, it demonstrates the environmental impacts that these actions cause, exposing that they become harmful economic impacts for the agricultural production chain, so there will be feedbacks of new techniques and technologies for the better use of the land. In this way, the content will be presented in simple language for the understanding of the target audience, which are mostly of low level of education.

This project aims that with the explanation of the economic losses, the farmers see deforestation and burning losses, and explore it in a developmental and sustainable way. Thus, the biggest cause of ecological destruction will be converted in favor of the environment and the economy.

The platform is free and does not require registration to be accessed. It has specific tabs for each subject to be treated, so the information is organized and the visitor will be able to directly access the information they are looking for. The information can also be accessed by state in order to facilitate the visitor's visualization.

How We Developed This Project

As residents of northern Brazil, in the Amazon region, we feel an obligation to preserve this ecosystem for future generations. We see that fires are increasing in the Amazon every year, so we wanted to create a way to prevent forest fires, through knowledge.

This challenge led us to think in order to create a resolution to the problem of our daily lives in the Amazon forest. We think it is important to warn about how the exploitation in the Amazon uses ancient techniques (culturally rooted) that do not use all the productive potential of the lands, damaging the economy, and each year destroys more, deregulating the world's physical phenomena and the biodiversity of the forest.

Therefore, we use as a basis the prerogative that “the expansion (of land) of agriculture is not related to the increase in productivity, consequently with the economy, but with investments in biotechnologies”.

In this way, we take data on production per hectare, deforested area, burnt area and total production from two Brazilian states, Pará (the second largest state in the country, with the highest deforestation rate - MAIN PRODUCTS IN ITS GDP, SOYA AND CATTLE) and Mato Grosso (the largest producer of soybeans and cattle in Brazil), to verify that the recent productive growth in Mato Grosso is related to the application of intensive production.

With the help of the tools: INPE, Canvas, PowToon, Google Docs and Nasa Worldview we developed the project, some tools were essential sources to get information.

We had problems finding information and relating our acquired knowledge to a possible solution. We knew from the beginning that we wanted to be accessible to the population, but we didn't know how to do that. We researched more, and then found that one of the main factors behind the cause of burning in the Amazon is deforestation for agricultural production and openness to pasture. That is why we thought of informing these producers about the losses. There was a lot of information to find, but with effort, dedication and commitment we managed.

How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project

We use data from the Worldview (NASA) and Jaxa satellites for the strategic demonstration of physical changes (in climate, vegetation, fire propensity) in specific states of Brazil.