About

Amazon Mining Watch is a partnership between the Pulitzer Center's Rainforest Investigations Network, Amazon Conservation, and Earth Genome. These nonprofit organizations have joined forces to bring together the power of machine learning and investigative reporting to shed light on large-scale environmental problems in the Amazon.

All the data published on this website and the code used to generate it are available for download. Our hope is that journalists, activists, and researchers can use this information to better contextualize it and provide on-the-ground validation. The methodology and the limitations of this platform are described on this site and on GitHub.

The partners

The Rainforest Investigations Network was created in 2020 by the Pulitzer Center to support investigative journalists in the three main rainforest regions: the Amazon, the Congo Basin, and Southeast Asia. In its four years of activity, the network has provided 55 fellowships to reporters investigating environmental crime, corruption, and the supply chains driving the destruction of forests.

Amazon Conservation has been leading science-based conservation work since 1999. It currently works as an Alliance with sister organizations in Peru (ACCA) and Bolivia (ACEAA) for targeted work in those countries. In addition, with its innovative satellite-based MAAP program, the organization now covers the entire Amazon biome, with a specialty of tracking and addressing deforestation in real-time with partners in each country.

Earth Genome is a nonprofit that designs and builds with AI and earth data to help guide researchers, policy makers, and communicators to effective actions on the most pressing climate and conservation issues of our times. Building on this model of investigations in the Amazon region, and technical developments with Earth Index, the organization is expanding detection of illegal mining throughout the entire world.