MapBiomas is an initiative of the Climate Observatory and a collaborative network of non-governmental organizations, universities and companies in Brazil, organized with the objective of using quality and low-cost technology to produce annual series of maps (from 1985 onwards).

MapBiomas Bolivia is an initiative coordinated by the Friends of Nature Foundation, and was created in conjunction with the Amazon Georeferenced Socio-Environmental Information Network (RAISG). Its objective is to generate annual maps of coverage and land use for all Bolivia (1985-2021), based on the methodology built for Brazilian biomes by the MapBiomas team.

MapBiomas Bolivia involves researchers and specialists in remote sensing, informatics, ecosystems, and land use from Bolivia. All work is done using cloud computing through the Google Earth Engine platform.

The land cover, land use and Landsat mosaics maps can be downloaded through the following link: MapBiomas Bolivia Collections

In this link you will find a tool in Google Earth Engine that allows the download of the complete collection, as well as the download by specific territorial or temporal slices.

Don't forget to download the legend codes at: Legend codes

Large time series of land cover and land use maps generated at the scale that MapBiomas Bolivia works (30 m pixels) are not practical in vector format. All data processing is done in raster format, pixel by pixel.

There is no such possibility on the MapBiomas Bolivia platform. Map vectorization is extremely expensive in terms of computational resources and impractical for the whole territory. The recommended solution, if you want to work with vector, is to download the data, make the territorial or spatial cutout of your interest and then vectorize with your preferred software.

Yes, the data of MapBiomas Bolivia are public and free for non-commercial use or for public interest purposes.

Yes, the MapBiomas Bolivia collections are available as layers (assets) in the Google Earth Engine platform and can be accessed, processed and analyzed directly on the platform without the need to download the data. To obtain the IDs of the MapBiomas Bolivia collections of the Google Earth Engine, go to: Tools.

It is necessary to have an account in Google Earth Engine (GEE), which can be created through the following link: https://earthengine.google.com

By accessing the GEE Code Editor (https://code.earthengine.google.com) you can start scripts to view and process data. In this link you will find examples of scripts to access the MapBiomas Bolivia data in Google Earth Engine: Tools

MapBiomas Bolivia data are public and free, you can make use of them by simply referring to the source with the following format: 

"MapBiomas Bolivia Project - Collection [number] of the Annual Land Cover and Land Use Series for Bolivia, acquired [date] through the link: [LINK]" 

"MapBiomas Bolivia Project - is an initiative of the Friends of Nature Foundation (FAN) with the multi-institutional co-creation of RAISG to generate annual cover and land use maps from automatic classification processes applied to satellite images." The full description of the project can be found at https://bolivia.mapbiomas.org/

The detailed legend description with the correspondent code (raster) is available for download at

Legend Codes

Yes, coverage and land use statistics, as well as transition matrices are available for nationwide, biomes, departments, municipalities and other territorial units for discharge into:

Statistics

To download the data by region or municipality , they can be generated with Google Earth Engine, accessing the scripts available at the link. You must select the region, the municipality, the years of interest and export it to your Google Drive folder.

Toolkit: Land Use Land Cover Maps

Landsat has an average resolution of 30 m, so it is common to associate the area of a pixel to 900 m2. But, since the original MapBiomas Bolivia data are created following the GEE standard representation (Lat/Long and WGS84), it does not use an equivalent projection (equal area). Therefore, the distance from the target to the Equator line influences the pixel size. Therefore, at continental scale, the calculation of pixel count and multiplication by 900 m2 should be avoided. 

In MapBiomas Bolivia we apply two methods to calculate the area:

1 - When performed outside Google Earth Engine, we reproduce the MapBiomas Bolivia datum for the UTM system and calculate the metric value of the central pixel, located at the intersection between the reference 1: 250,000 chart and the area of interest. Then, we count all the pixels within the area of interest and multiply by the reference value, in m², of the central pixel previously calculated. 

2 - When the calculation is performed in Google Earth Engine, we apply the function ee.Image.pixelArea () which generates an image in which the value of each pixel is the area of that pixel in square meters, taking into account possible cartographic distortions

You can access the description of all the reference maps used by MapBiomas Bolivia at:

Reference maps