ABSTRACT
The Amazonia region comprises the greatest rain forest of our planet where the largest continuous remaining tropical forest can be found. In Brazil, an accelerated anthropization process began at the end of the 1960s in response to governmental policies to integrate the vast Amazonian region with the rest of the country. Since 1988, the Brazilian governmnt has performed annual monitoring of the Amazon forest using Landsat-type imagery through the PRODES project carried out by the Brazilian Institute for Space Research (INPE). PRODES information is based primarily on Landsat imagery. This chapter presents an overview of the PRODES and DETER projects for annual and monthly monitoring of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon, respectively. Initially, the Brazilian Amazon region is characterized in terms of its soil, biodiversity, climate, and vegetation followed by the deforestation history and the description of the methodology developed at INPE for the deforestation monitoring activities based on remote sensing image- processing and geographic information system (GIS) techniques.
