The Vale Fund, a non-profit civil society association established by Vale, together with Microsoft and the Instituto do Homem e Meio Ambiente da Amazônia, the Institute of Man and the Environment of the Amazon, officially launched PrevisIA, a tool that uses Artificial Intelligence to provide information on regions of the Amazon at high risk of deforestation and fires. This tool, which aims to help protect the Amazon rainforest during the dry season that began in June 2021, was presented today at a virtual event attended by Hugo Barreto, director of Sustainability and Social Investment at Vale; Tânia Cosentino, president of Microsoft Brasil; and Carlos Souza Jr, associate researcher at Imazon.PrevisIA will analyze diverse data variables such as topography, land cover, urban infrastructure, legal and illegal roads and socioeconomic data to identify possible trends in forest conversion from deforestation. Using advanced computer cloud capabilities from Microsoft Azure and the AI algorithm developed by Imazon to detect roads in satellite images, PrevisIA has enhanced the deforestation risk model to identify the different types of territories threatened by deforestation in the Amazon, including Indigenous Lands and Conservation Units.The initiative will publicly disclose the information in from the control panel which can be used by public agencies to plan and carry out preventative measures to combat and control deforestation. Imazon will promote the PrevisIA platform with the stakeholders that can best benefit from this solution. “The major breakthrough of this project was to democratize access to advanced Information Technology resources to facilitate the involvement of several users in preventing and controlling deforestation in the Amazon”, said Carlos Souza Jr, an associate researcher at Imazon.
The Vale Fund, a non-profit civil society association established by Vale, together with Microsoft and the Instituto do Homem e Meio Ambiente da Amazônia, the Institute of Man and the Environment of the Amazon, officially launched PrevisIA, a tool that uses Artificial Intelligence to provide information on regions of the Amazon at high risk of deforestation and fires. This tool, which aims to help protect the Amazon rainforest during the dry season that began in June 2021, was presented today at a virtual event attended by Hugo Barreto, director of Sustainability and Social Investment at Vale; Tânia Cosentino, president of Microsoft Brasil; and Carlos Souza Jr, associate researcher at Imazon.PrevisIA will analyze diverse data variables such as topography, land cover, urban infrastructure, legal and illegal roads and socioeconomic data to identify possible trends in forest conversion from deforestation. Using advanced computer cloud capabilities from Microsoft Azure and the AI algorithm developed by Imazon to detect roads in satellite images, PrevisIA has enhanced the deforestation risk model to identify the different types of territories threatened by deforestation in the Amazon, including Indigenous Lands and Conservation Units.The initiative will publicly disclose the information in from the control panel which can be used by public agencies to plan and carry out preventative measures to combat and control deforestation. Imazon will promote the PrevisIA platform with the stakeholders that can best benefit from this solution. “The major breakthrough of this project was to democratize access to advanced Information Technology resources to facilitate the involvement of several users in preventing and controlling deforestation in the Amazon”, said Carlos Souza Jr, an associate researcher at Imazon.
