Book

User Manual. Training Manual Terra-i.

The user manual describes the installation process of the Terra-i system as well as the necessary tools for its functioning. Input data acquisition procedures used by Terra-i are also described. Finally, it shows the insights, methods and formats involved in each step of the pre-processing stage.

Description:
Terra-i is a tool that detects vegetal land cover changes product of human activities in near real time. It has the capability to produce data every 16 days. Nowadays, Terra-i is fully functional pan-tropically (Latin America, Caribbean, Asia and Oceania). The system is based on the premise that, from one date to the next, natural vegetation follows a predictable pattern of changes in greenness brought by site-specific land and climatic conditions over the same period. A computational neural network is ‘trained’ to understand the normal pattern of changes in vegetation greenness in relation to terrain and rainfall for a site and then marks areas as changed where the greenness suddenly changes well beyond these normal limits. Running on many computers, this analysis is refreshed with new imagery every 16 days and for every 250m square of land.