Datasets for Amazonia and the Cerrado

Peter Schlesinger, Daniel Nepstad and Paul Lefebvre - The Woods Hole Research Center

We are pleased to release this collection of Amazonian datasets assembled with funding from the National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA). This project was conducted in anticipation of the Large-Scale Biosphere Atmosphere Experiment (LBA), an international research effort led by Brazil. The LBA home page is maintained by the Brazilian weather and climate agency CPTEC (Centro de Previsão de Tempo e Estudos Climáticos) with a US LBA mirror site maintained at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL).

The science questions to be addressed by LBA are:

  • How does Amazonia currently function as a regional entity?
  • How will changes in land use and climate affect the biological, chemical, and physical functions of Amazonia, including the sustainability of development in the region and the influence of Amazonia on global climate?

An ecologically focused portion of the LBA effort will be funded by NASA, and this project has as its science question, the following:

  • How do tropical forest conversion, re-growth, and selective logging influence carbon storage, nutrient dynamics, trace gas fluxes, and the prospect for sustainable land use in Amazonia?

It is our hope that the datasets that can be accessed through this website, and those which will be added over the coming months, will facilitate both the research that will be carried out through the LBA and other studies that require spatially-explicit datasets for this very important tropical forest formation.

The datasets presented here were assembled by The Woods Hole Research Center in collaboration with the following institutions: Instituto de Pesquisa Ambiental da Amazônia (Amazonian Institute for Environmental Research, IPAM), Pennsylvania State University, Instituto de Homem e do Meio Ambiente da Amazônia (The Amazonian Institute for Man and the Environment, IMAZON), Empresa Brasileira de Pesquisa Agropecuária/Centro de Pesquisa Agropecuária do Cerrado (Brazilian Agricultural Research Agency/Center for Agricultural Research of the Cerrado), Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais (National Institute of Space Research, INPE), and Universidade de Brasilia (University of Brasilia).

Additional information on land-use in Amazonia and the Cerrado can be found in:

D.C. Nepstad, C.A. Klink, C. Uhl, I.C. Vieira, P. Lefebvre, M. Pedlowski, E. Matricardi, G. Negreiros, I.F. Brown, E. Amaral, A. Homma and R. Walker. 1997. Land-use in Amazonia and the Cerrado of Brazil. Ciéncia e Cultura 49(1/2): 73-86

Funding for this project was provided by NASA through grant HPUSP#884, MTPE Number 5303-TE/95-0059 to The Woods Hole Research Center.

Datasets Acquired from Non-Brazilian Sources

  1. Composited Normalized Difference Vegetation Index, including:
    16 km ndvi data from the noaa avhrr satellites in weekly time steps from the period 1982-1994 (Source: Dataset ID: GNV28, UNEP/GRID, Geneva). metadata / data
    8 km NDVI data from the NOAA AVHRR satellites in weekly time steps from the period 1982-1994 (Source: Landsat AVHRR Pathfinder, NASA/GSFC website). metadata / data
    1 km NDVI data from the NOAA AVHRR satellites in monthly time steps from the period April 1992-March 1993 (Source: Global Land Cover Characterization, USGS/EROS Data Center website). metadata / data
  2. Soil Map of Brazil (IBGE, 1981) (Source: Dataset from UNEP/GRID, Sioux Falls ftp site). metadata / data
  3. Vegetation Map of Brazil (IBGE, 1988) (Source: Dataset from UNEP/GRID, Sioux Falls ftp site). metadata / data
  4. A Map of the Vegetation of South America Based on Satellite Imagery (1992) (Source: Stone et al., The Woods Hole Research Center, Woods Hole, MA). metadata / data

Datasets Acquired from Brazilian Sources

  1. Fire Count Images (Source: A. Setzer, INPE, Brazil).
    These data contain weekly cumulative fire counts from analyses of AVHRR data from NOAA 12 and 14 in grid cells of 0.5 degrees of latitude by 0.5 degrees of longitude arranged in a matrix covering from 7 deg N to 40 deg S and from 75 deg W to 34.5 deg W for 1994-1997. metadata / data
  2. Land Cover Evaluation of the State of Tocantins, Brazil (Source: EMBRAPA-CPAC/UnB, Brazil).
    Eduardo Assad (EMBRAPA-CPAC) and Carlos Klink (UnB) have completed Landsat TM-based mapping of areas of native cerrado vegetation conversion for southern Maranhão State and Tocantins. The digitized maps of cerrado conversion are available here for the State of Tocantins. Assad has also done conversion/deforestation mapping for Mata Grosso, Goias, and Southern Pará. Some of these maps may also be available for LBA. metadata / data

  3. Spatial Distribution of Saw Mills in Brazilian Amazonia (Source: IMAZON, Brazil).

    Amazonia contains the world's largest reserve of tropical timber. More than 2000 mills are harvesting this timber, and in the process they are altering large areas of forest, constructing roads into remote forest regions, and providing employment and revenue to rural Amazonian economies. An understanding of the spatial distribution of these saw mills, the volumes of wood that they are harvesting, and the area of forest that they are harvesting, is needed if we are to understand the impact of human activities upon carbon, water and nutrient cycles of Amazonian ecosystems.

    The Instituto Amazônico do Homem e do Meio Ambiente (Amazon Institute of Man and the Environment, IMAZON) has completed a survey of 1190 saw mills operating in Brazilian Amazonia, which is almost half of the total number of mills operating in this region (~2500). The mills that were interviewed are distributed among 76 wood processing centers ("polos madeireiros") which are responsible for more than 95% of all of the wood production in Brazilian Amazonia. metadata / data

  4. Rural Households of Pará, Brazil (Source: IMAZON, Brazil).

    Future land-use patterns in Amazonia will depend, to a large extent, on the geographical distribution of the rural human population. Maps of deforestation show the cumulative effects of this rural population on forest cover, but do not provide information about the distribution and concentrations of rural households. The Rural Households Dataset provides a digital map of rural households for the state of Pará, located in eastern Amazonia. metadata / data

  5. Industrial Mining (Source: IPAM, Brazil/WHRC, USA).

    One of the most important human activities in Amazonia is industrial mining. The areal extent of active mine sites in the region is quite small, totalling less than 50,000 hectares, the size of a single large ranch. However, the influence of industrial mines on land-use in Amazonia goes far beyond the area of direct impact, for they can exert a strong influence on the construction of roads, the development of electricity networks, and the migration patterns of the Amazon labor. Knowledge of the current distribution of mines, and the plans that are being made for new mines, is needed to predict the course of frontier expansion in Amazonia.

    The Woods Hole Research Center, in collaboration with the Amazon Institute of Environmental Research (Instituto de Pesquisa Ambiental da Amazônia, IPAM), has assembled data from the Brazilian National Department of Mineral Production (Departamento Nacional de Produção Mineral, DNPM) on the requests for mineral exploration and for mine construction in the followingstates of the Brazilian Amazon: Acre, Amapá, Amazônas, Pará, Rondônia, and Roraima. Data were not available for the states of Tocantins, Mato Grosso and Maranhão. metadata / data

  6. Soil Profiles of Amazonia (Source: IPAM, Brazil/WHRC, USA).

    We are releasing soil profile descriptions for 1168 locations throughout Brazilian Amazonia. These data are primarily based on RADAMBRASIL surveys. metadata / data

  7. Link to Precipitation Data for the Amazon Basin at The University of Washington's EOS AMAZON project.