a combination of remote sensing and a Brazilian NGO, Imazon.
Brazil’s space agency published figures on deforestation, but only on an annual basis, nearly a year in retrospect and without a map, so nobody knew exactly where the trees were coming down. Beto Verissimo, who founded Imazon to use science for the benefit of the rainforest, realised that NASA’s Modis satellite collected data that could be published monthly and would also show were the damage was being done. In 2007 Imazon started processing NASA’s data and publishing them within a few weeks of being collected.