CopernicusLAC Chile launches unprecedented “Land Cover and Land Use” and “Urban Atlas” mapping services for Latin America and the Caribbean

PRINT

CopernicusLAC Chile launches unprecedented "Land Cover and Land Use" and "Urban Atlas" mapping services for Latin America and the Caribbean

© Copernicus

The Copernicus Regional Center for Latin America and the Caribbean(CopernicusLAC Chile), announced the launch of the "Land Cover and Land Use"and "Urban Atlas"satellite mapping services for the entire region, in a ceremony held at the Faculty of Physical and Mathematical Sciences(FCFM) of the University of Chile. There, the director of CopernicusLAC Chile, Florencio Utreras, explained that "it is very important that the European Union made available to the world community, in an open and freely accessible way, the Earth observation satellite data that allow monitoring the natural processes that occur on the Earth's surface, atmosphere and ocean".

The project, co-financed by the European Union(EU) and the University of Chile, and executed by the Center for Mathematical Modeling(CMM) of the University of Chile, uses data from the Sentinel satellite constellation, part of the EU's Copernicusprogram, and machine learning models complemented with local data developed by the countries of the region. This collaboration has made it possible to build these permanent urban and regional land use monitoring services at 20 meters resolution in the case of land and at 10 meters resolution in the case of cities.

Ewout Sandker, Head of Cooperation of the European Union Delegation in Chile, emphasized the importance of this initiative: "The launch of these innovative services, unique in the region, represents a significant milestone as they will provide invaluable information on land cover, land use patterns and urban development in our cities. We hope that these new Copernicus services can be used in multiple applications to promote sustainable development in Latin America and the Caribbean."

For Francisco Martínez, dean of the Faculty of Physical and Mathematical Sciences of the University of Chile, this project is the result of "a virtuous link between the University of Chile and the European Union, which allows us to make available to all the countries of the region, scientific information of the territory to guide decision-making in areas as diverse as urban planning, mining and agriculture, always with the aim of contributing to sustainable development at the regional level".

The Director of International Relations of the CMM, Alejandro Maass, emphasized that "as a center we do theorems. We put these theorems and modeling at the service of problem solving. Providing a service is this, but every day, with the idea, in addition, of improving them with the development of new ideas and needs".

Urban Atlas for Latin America and the Caribbean

The first version of the atlas has a pixel resolution of ten meters and identifies and classifies five categories of land use in the capitals of the countries of the region: buildings, transportation units, urban vegetation, bare soil and bodies of water.

Jaime Ortega, scientific director of CopernicusLAC Chile and principal investigator of the CMM, explained that "it is a map that has colors, each category has a color and what that color represents is what type of cover is below, that is, forest, water or inhabited land. These tools are vital, for example, for the territorial planning of municipalities, with respect to areas at risk from forest fires or floods, or to see what the effect of climate change is, with respect to the type of vegetation or if there is deforestation".

Although the concept of Urban Atlases has existed for some years in Europe, this initiative is a pioneer in Latin America and the Caribbean,being the first monitoring service for urban areas in the region, and it also stands out for its collaborative process, from access to local territorial data to the product validation process.

Land Cover and Land Use Classification Maps

This service provides information, at 20-meter pixel resolution, on land cover and its changes in the LAC region in the seven categories: Shrub or Herbaceous Associations, Forest, Crops and Agriculture, Non-aquatic Bare Soil, Artificial Surfaces, Aquatic Surfaces, and Snow and Ice.

"This is a first step. We want to continue advancing in the amount of data over time, now we are starting with information from 2023 and already over time we will also be processing backwards, and in the deeper levels of classification,that is, identifying an agricultural land and then, for example, knowing what type of cereal it is or if there is a forest, we are interested in knowing if it is a native forest or a plantation," said Professor Ortega.

Satellite Images and Human and Artificial Intelligence

For the design of CopernicusLAC Chile's services, the team from the Mathematical Modeling Center of the University of Chile processed images from the Sentinel constellation. "These capture the intensity with which the ground responds to the sun, which is permanently emitting waves of the entire electromagnetic spectrum, from gamma rays, X-rays, ultraviolet to visible colors, which is a small part. Then, all that radiation reaches the Earth, one part is absorbed, one is deviated and another bounces back to the satellite, which allows us to deduce what type of surface those waves impacted," said Florencio Utreras.

Jaime Ortega added that, in order to obtain accurate results, they trained artificial intelligence algorithms considering "the 16 types of climates in force in the region and dividing the map of Latin America and the Caribbean into 37 zones. There are several steps that are done, some use neural networks, others use classification algorithms. In short, they are supervised learning algorithms".

The scientific director added that "as the satellites are 700 kilometers high, you need the information on the ground, that is why regional cooperation is very important. We are signing agreements with the countries to have access to their data, which are used to calibrate what the satellites see".

Copernicus in Chile

With the launch of Sentinel-1A in 2014, the European Union launched Copernicus, an Earth Observation program that aims to put into orbit a constellation of nearly 20 more satellites before 2030. The wide variety of potential research resources, generated that the State of Chile, through the Undersecretary of Telecommunications (Subtel), and Copernicus signed in March 2018 an agreement to have a data repository, which Subtel then sealed operationally with the University of Chile.

"Since 2018, we focused on two tasks: dissemination, which consisted of informing and building a regional community through various seminars, and materializing the repository, that is a distributor of Copernicus images on Chile. Later, when the European Commission began to look at where to install a center to distribute the images of all Latin America and the Caribbean, it seemed natural to make the link with something that was already working," said Utreras.

In March 2023, the European Union and the University of Chile signed the opening in Santiago of the Copernicus Regional Center for Latin America and the Caribbean, which provided funding of 5 million Euros. This follows the inauguration the previous year of the final connectivity section between Brazil, Argentina and Chile of the BELLA (Building the Europe Link to Latin America) program, which is central to the high-speed submarine networks.

After the launch of "Land Cover and Land Use" and "Urban Atlas", CopernicusLAC Chile plans to launch the third service, Ocean Coastal Monitoring, by 2025.