Forests 2020 is a major investment by the UK Space Agency, as part of the International Partnerships Programme (IPP). Project managed by Ecometrica, Forests 2020 uses advanced mapping technologies, satellite data and other insights to help protect and restore tropical forests through improved forest monitoring. Ecometrica has partnered with Environment Systems to deliver an automated and scalable approach to mapping soybeans in Brazil. Brazil possesses about one third of the world’s remaining rainforests, covering almost 60% of the country’s surface. It is also the largest soybean producer and expected to export 77 million tons of soybeans in 2020.

Western Bahia was identified as the pilot area, a region of Brazil characterised by large scale intensive agriculture, the majority of which is soybean cultivation. Here the rainy season stretches from October through to April, during which time soybeans are the principal crop, being sown from October and fully harvested by the end of March.

On this project we used our own Data Services to acquire the necessary Sentinel satellite data. The field level mapping approach required field boundary data. This was created using our own machine learning algorithm which automatically generated over 18,500 field boundaries covering an area of over 80,000 km². Radar satellite imagery was also acquired for the 2019-20 growing season generating a ‘soybean profile’ for each field showing how it grows over time.

To develop and test the map and achieve higher levels of crop classification accuracy, field work was required to verify the crop on the ground and thus provide additional ‘training’ points for the algorithm. Environment Systems surveyors collected over 1,100 data points. These points were applied to the field boundaries and satellite data to produce an automated classification with an accuracy of over 90%.

Following on from the pilot, the approach was rolled out in another of Brazil’s intensive agriculture regions, Mato Grosso. Almost 45,000 field boundaries were generated and an area of 100,000 km² was successfully mapped, identifying all the soya production, at a field scale, without the need for any field surveys. The maps are now accessible online via Ecometrica’s EOLab platform. You can find out more about Forests 2020 here.