Terra-I detects and monitors land cover change resulting from human activities. It was developed in cooperation with CIAT to provide decision-makers and national and local authorities near real time updates of vegetation loss and deforestation.
Terra-I will be a powerful tool for this research project. My ability to estimate the carbon impact at a national level is largely dependent on the Terra-I team being able to locate and estimate the sizes of cocoa plantations. The exercise will require a visual inspection of satellite imagery to confirm what a typical cocoa farm signature should look like. This information will then be able to be fed back into the system in order to replicate on a large scale.
Below is a short time-lapse video of Terra-I detecting land-use change and deforestation (shown in red) in the Amazon.