About this tracker

What it shows

The dashboard follows a 12-month pulse of deforestation alerts across all nine Amazon countries, with near-real-time detail for Brazil, active-fire detections from the last 48 hours, and overlays for illegal mining, coca cultivation, logging concessions, protected areas, and Indigenous territories. The Earth Explorer puts the same signals on a photorealistic globe with curated notable places.

Data sources

live requested at runtime — refresh cadence in note *.
dataset a fixed snapshot baked into the site — version and bake date in note †.

• Global Forest Watch — integrated deforestation alerts (GLAD/RADD), basin-wide live*
• INPE DETER — near-real-time deforestation detail for Brazil live*
• NASA FIRMS — VIIRS active-fire detections, last 48 h live*
• World Bank Open Data — country indicators live*
• GBIF — biodiversity record count live*
• Copernicus Sentinel-2 via Microsoft Planetary Computer — dated 10 m photography in feature cards live*
• NOAA STAR GOES-19 — "Live from orbit": the last two hours of GeoColor frames over northern South America, every 10 minutes (true colour by day; infrared cloud plus a city-lights layer by night — a composite, not a night photograph) live*
• NASA GIBS — "Latest from orbit" basemap: the day's VIIRS (Suomi-NPP) true-colour photograph of the whole basin, 375 m live*
• Esri World Imagery (Maxar) — undated high-resolution mosaic under every satellite-imagery card, and the picture when no clear Sentinel-2 pass covers the spot live*
• Esri World Imagery Wayback — dated releases of that mosaic back to 2014; the time-lapse on mining, deforestation and logging-concession cards steps through the releases in which the imagery over the spot actually changed live*
• Live webcams — YouTube streams by their operators: afarTV, AmzLive · Instituto Soka Amazônia, EarthCam · Junglekeepers, and Rainforest Expeditions (Tambopata MacawCam) live*
• GBIF — species recorded per country with an IUCN Red List category dataset†
• RAISG — protected areas and Indigenous territories dataset†
• Amazon Mining Watch — machine-detected mining scars dataset†
• UNODC SIMCI — coca-cultivation monitoring (Colombia) dataset†
• InSight Crime and Infobae — armed-group / illicit-economy presence, curated per municipality with citations dataset†
• Natural Earth — country boundaries dataset†

* Refresh cadence. GFW tiles are always the latest published; the GFW basin summary refreshes hourly. DETER refreshes every 30 min (INPE's last good copy may be served for up to 3 days during an outage). FIRMS refreshes every 10 min. World Bank country indicators refresh daily (the forest-area KPI is pinned to the 2022 series). The GBIF record count is fetched on every visit. Card photography is the clearest of the newest Sentinel-2 passes over the site (captured within the last year, under 30 % scene cloud), looked up when a card opens. The Wayback time-lapse resolves its release list daily and probes which releases changed a spot when a card opens (dates are release dates — imagery was captured on or before them). The GOES live panel re-reads NOAA's frame list every 5 min while open (frames land every 10 min, a few minutes after capture). The orbit basemap is today's mosaic once NASA has published it over the whole basin (usually evening UTC) and yesterday's until then — the date is shown next to the toggle, and clouds are real. Webcam stream ids are re-resolved from each operator's channel every 15 min (feeds go dark at night and intermittent operators relay only part of the day).

† Dataset versions: GBIF Red-List species — GBIF occurrence facets, baked 2026-08-22 · RAISG — aprotegida2024 + raisg_anps/3, baked 2026-07-26 · Amazon Mining Watch — 48px_v4.10b-18d-20g-21a-22bc-ensemble · cumulative 2018– · upstream 2026-08-20, baked 2026-08-22 · UNODC SIMCI — 2024 grid via datos.gov.co, map baked 2026-07-27 · globe 2026-08-01 · armed groups — hand-curated, baked 2026-08-02 · Natural Earth — Natural Earth 1:50m admin-0 @ ca96624, baked 2026-08-02.

Honesty notes

Alert systems detect change, not intent — a cleared plot, a burn scar, and a storm blowdown can look alike from orbit. Detections carry latency (days to weeks) and coverage varies by country. Treat everything here as a situational signal, not a legal record.

The armed-group / illicit-economy layer is different in kind from the rest of the dashboard: there is no live feed for it. It is a small, hand-cited sample of municipalities drawn from independent journalism (InSight Crime, Infobae) — not a tracked, comprehensive, or real-time map of criminal presence. Markers render with a dashed, editorial treatment to keep that distinction visible on the map itself, not just in this note.