By Bibiana Alcântara Garrido*
Director of Science at IPAM (Instituto de Pesquisa Ambiental da Amazônia) and a specialist in fire in the Amazon and Cerrado biomes, Dr. Ane Alencar was awarded, on International Women’s Day, 8, by the 2022 Leading Women in Machine Learning for Earth Observation, organized by the Radiant Earth Foundation. This is the first time that the initiative has nominated a Latin American researcher.
“I feel very honored to receive this recognition. This is the result of some very important work we’ve been doing over the years, studying the pattern of forest fires in the Amazon and more recently in the Mapbiomas network,” says Alencar, who coordinates the MapBiomas platforms for the Cerrado biome and MapBiomas Fogo. Networked with institutions, universities and technology companies in Brazil and around the world, MapBiomas is a pioneering initiative that uses satellite data to reveal the main changes in land use in the country.
Born in Belém, Pará, Ane Auxiliadora Costa Alencar has a degree in Geography from UFPA (Federal University of Pará), a master’s degree in Remote Sensing and Geographic Information Systems from Boston University and a doctorate in Forest Resources and Conservation from the University of Florida, both in the United States. For more than two decades, his focus has been on understanding the impacts of climate change and forest fragmentation caused by deforestation and the occurrence and increase of forest fires in the Brazilian Amazon and Cerrado.
A highlight of the award is the concept of “Fire Scars”, created by Alencar in 1996 by defining areas affected by forest fires in the Amazon on printed satellite images. “His innovative discovery and mapping of fire in the Amazon,” says Radiant Earth, led to the creation of the MapBiomas Fogo platform, a system for validating and refining deforestation alerts with high-resolution images for annual mapping of fire scars in Brazil since 1985.
At IPAM, the director coordinates initiatives to develop systems for monitoring forest carbon stocks and losses and deforestation in order to inform discussions on public policies that encourage the reduction of emissions from deforestation and forest degradation.
In addition to the Brazilian, researchers were selected from Australia, the United States, Nepal, Russia, Taiwan and Kenya, whose scientific contributions have a global impact on improving the use of machine learning for planetary observation and remote sensing. “For this reason, we celebrate the women at the forefront of ML4EO [Machine Learning for Earth Observation]: those who are shedding light on our patterns and helping us make data-driven decisions,” says the foundation organizing the award.
*Journalist at IPAM, bibiana.garrido@ipam.org.br
