Radar tracking, a new ally to stop illegal mining in the Amazon

From space, it penetrates the dense cloud layer that dominates the rainforest, tracks the illegal minery, and alert throughout the year of the deforestation on the Peruvian Amazone, a country where the “gold rush” has devastated more than 96,000 hectares of primary forests in the last 30 years.

This is RAMI, a brand new geospatial technology tool that monitors the progress of gold extraction via satellite and radar in the jungle region of Madre de Dios, Peru’s capital of biodiversity.

There lies La Pampa, a territory located in the middle of the buffer zone of the Tambopata National Reserve, today buried in mercury, with huge empty sands, mud lagoons and scrap metal nests for having been for years the great bastion of illegal mining and informal of this region of the country.

In addition to generating early mining warnings and allowing access to real-time information on changes in forest cover, the novelty of this radar mining monitoring tool lies in its ability to overcome the limitation of clouds and observe forests without import climatic phenomena 365 days a year.

“Before this new platform was incorporated, it was only working at the level of optical images, but there was a basic deficiency: the satellite captured images only six months a year, from June to December, as there was an information gap during the season of rain ”, explained the specialist of the Satellite Georeferential Monitoring Unit of the Special Prosecutor’s Office in Environmental Matters (FEMA) of Madre de Dios.

The man, who preferred to remain anonymous for security reasons, added that now, with RAMI, “monitoring is constant, be it day, night, rain or cloud.”

Conserve forests

This radar remote sensing tool was developed by the Amazon Conservation Association – ACCA under the Servir-Amazonía program, led by the Bioversity International Alliance and the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT).

Servir-Amazonia is part of Servir Global, a joint development initiative between the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).

With the implementation of RAMI, since last June, it seeks to strengthen the actions of the Peruvian State aimed at combating the loss of forest cover at the hands of illegal mining in Madre de Dios and thus contribute to the conservation of one of the forests with the greatest diversity of the planet.

Deforestation, loss of ecosystems and pollution of water, sediments and atmosphere are just some of the most direct impacts of the advance of this scourge that makes indiscriminate use of sinister machinery for cutting down forests, dredges for suction of the soil and mercury to separate the precious metal.

This was summarized by the director of ACCA in Madre de Dios, Juan Loja, who insisted on the usefulness of the alerts generated monthly by RAMI not only for the decision-making of the Government and the heads of protected areas, but also for the native communities of the region, the Police and the Public Ministry.

Field operations

“This information is very important because in one way or another it supports what one can make known. For example, if there is an invasion in the territory of a community, it can be said by phone, but much better when there is photographic or video evidence. We look at whether it is a forest issue or not and to which instance we derive it ”, explained the indigenous Shipibo Julio Cusurichi, president of the Native Federation of the Madre de Dios River and Tributaries (Fenamad).

In the same sense, the provincial prosecutor of the Fifth Office of the FEMA of Madre de Dios expressed: “These satellite images help us to determine where the mining activity is being carried out” and “with this information we can agree on a plan with the Police to make a intervention “, indicated the lawyer.

In fact, since the Peruvian government launched Operation Mercury in February 2019, an unprecedented measure to confront illegal gold mining in La Pampa, prosecutors and police have gone out into the countryside every day with the intention of wiping the new camps off the map. illegal miners and seize or intervene the machinery and vital inputs for this form of crime.

With RAMI, it is hoped to give encouragement to this and other efforts that to date have not yet been able to reverse the environmental disaster caused by the illegal exploitation of one of the many treasures of the Peruvian jungle.