Aerial view of a gold mining area in the Amazon forest region in the state of Para in Brazil. Photo: Tarcisio Schnaider/Adobe Stock
How an AI monitors mining in the Amazon
Mining in the Amazon region is a controversial topic. It has both ecological and social impacts: Deforestation, water pollution and land conflicts - all of these are linked to the mining of minerals such as gold, diamonds and bauxite. Illegal mining is widespread, and regulation and monitoring are often inadequate. The Amazon Mining Watch project monitors the destruction - thanks to artificial intelligence.
Aerial view of a gold mining area in the Amazon forest region in the state of Para in Brazil. Photo: Tarcisio Schnaider/Adobe Stock
Behind it are the Pulitzer Center's Rainforest Investigations Network and Earthrise Media. These two non-profit organisations bring together machine learning and investigative journalism to shed light on environmental problems in the Amazon region.
Since April 2022, the platform has been conducting 326 million analyses of high-resolution images covering the entire Amazon region every four months. That's nine countries and 6.7 million square kilometres, or more than 2,600 times the area of the Saarland.
The result: the algorithm identified mining activities over an area of more than 6,800 square kilometres. That is about four times the size of the entire city of New York.
Just click on the picture and observe mining in the Amazon region.
How it works
Students in the USA fed the AI with information. They searched for mines on satellite images of the Amazon region. The algorithm was then taught to recognise features of an open-cast mine from a bird's eye view.
In this way, it learnt to distinguish these areas from other land uses such as agriculture. The artificial neural network on which the Amazon Mining Watch is based can recognise patches of 44 by 44 pixels - the equivalent of 440 by 440 metres on the ground.
Because the AI model recognises mining areas based on topographical features, the platform does not initially distinguish between legal and illegal areas. Nevertheless, the main objective of Amazon Mining Watch has been achieved: to provide journalists, researchers and activists with the data as a starting point for further research.