Terra-i: an eye on habitat change

Terra-i detects land-cover changes resulting from human activities in near real-time, producing updates every 16 days. It currently runs for the whole of Latin America and is being expanded over the next year to cover the entire tropics. Terra-i is a collaboration between the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT - DAPA, based in Colombia), The program on Forestry, Trees and Agroforestry (FTA) ,The Nature Conservancy (TNC, global environmental organization), the School of Business and Engineering (HEIG-VD, based in Switzerland) and King’s College London (KCL, based in the UK). The system is based on the premise that natural vegetation follows a predictable pattern of changes in greenness from one date to the next brought about by site-specific land and climatic conditions over the same period. A so-called 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.