Google announced on Tuesday a series of agreements and donations to provide technology tools, especially artificial intelligence, to projects to combat deforestation and fires in the Brazilian Amazon.
The tech giant’s tools will enable its partners, public and non-governmental organizations, to track deforestation and provide real-time wildfire and flood alerts.
One major agreement was signed with the National Institute for Space Research (INPE), a Brazilian government agency that uses satellite imagery to measure deforestation.
INPE will be able to use Google’s artificial intelligence tools and cloud processing capabilities to detect wildfires at their earliest stages and be able to quickly take action to stop the fire from spreading.
The tech giant, which held an event in the Brazilian city of Belém to announce the agreements, has also signed other partnership agreements to support various non-governmental organizations.
Among them is an agreement with the Reference Center for Environmental Information (CRIA), which has a database of 166 million species records and 4.5 million images of the Amazon, which will make this data available in the cloud to any researcher.
“We are also going to test using visual computing with AI models to preclassify the millions of species submitted by herbaria so that the CRIA taxonomist network can identify the species and add them to their bank,” he said. Spanish agency Efe, Google Cloud Global Technology Director Patricia Florissi.
Another beneficiary will be the Instituto do Homem e do Ambiente da Amazonia (Imazon), which will be supported by artificial intelligence to analyze the thousands of satellite images it processes in order to detect road construction in the Amazon.