About

Amazon Mining Watch is a collaborative platform developed through a partnership between the Pulitzer Center's Rainforest Investigations Network, Amazon Conservation Association, and Earth Genome. These nonprofit organizations have joined forces to harness the power of technology, investigative reporting, and on-the-ground action to shed light on one of the Amazon Rainforest's biggest environmental challenges: widespread gold mining.

Our hope is that journalists, activists, researchers, policymakers, and local organizations can use our information to better contextualize the situation on the ground, helping drive collective action to combat mining and its impacts on people, nature, and climate.

All data published on this website, along with the code used to generate it, is easily accessible and publicly available for download. The methodology and the limitations of this platform are described on this site and on GitHub.

The partners

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

Amazon Conservation Association is a nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting the Amazon Rainforest through a holistic approach to conservation, centered on empowering people, protecting wild places, and putting science and technology to work. For 25 years, the organization has worked side by side with local people in Peru and Bolivia through its unique Alliance of sister organizations, and today it works across all 9 Amazonian countries through a network of local partners. It has been piloting science- and technology-based conservation solutions to protect the Amazon Rainforest since 1999, including flagship initiatives such as the Monitoring of the Andes Amazon Program (MAAP), which tracks the most urgent threats to the Amazon basin in real time and works with local partners to address them.

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 on technical developments with Earth Index, the organization is expanding the detection of illegal mining worldwide.