The IBGE launched today a digital platform including cartographic information on every 8.5 million km² of the Brazilian territory. Fed with data from the Monitoring of Land Use and Cover, this new tool allows to follow up the changes in the vegetation cover, occupation and agricultural activities in the entire Brazilian territory between 2000 and 2014.

From 2000 to 2014, nearly 13% of the national territory suffered some change in the land use and cover. This represents more than 1.1 million km2, an area greater than the territory of most countries in the world. This is just one of the analyses provided by the new digital tool from the IBGE, which uses data from the IBGE´s Monitoring of Land Use and Cover. The biannual monitoring crosses data obtained from satellites with field data, among other sources, in order to map the changes in the vegetation cover of Brazil, assessing which agricultural activities are related to those changes.

The new portal is interactive and friendly. Its use does not require knowledge of any expert software, making it accessible both to the technical public and the society in general. The system uses statistical grids, detailing every 1 km². It is possible to compare data over time and cross them with other statistical and geoscientific databases, allowing the historical follow up of the organization and spatialization of the economic activities and their impacts on the natural resources in Brazil, kilometer by kilometer.

The information on the Land Use and Cover is available for 2000, 2010, 2012 and 2014 and is updated at every two years, based on 14 types of classification according to the elements found in land, like pasture areas, forest vegetation, silviculture, water bodies and agricultural areas. These divisions can be complemented with other data layers from surveys of the IBGE and other organizations that use statistical grids, allowing to aggregate information like demography, road infrastructure, vegetation, biomes, Conservation Units and Indian lands, among others.

The integration of data into a statistical grid allows the standardization of the information coming from different sources, either internal or external to the IBGE. This enables more precise historical analyses and optimizes the production of environmental statistics in a number of areas, like public planning, land use, estimates of carbon emission and sequestration, creation of environmental accounts, propagation of disease vectors, forest inventories and climate changes, among others.