While there are closed environmental reserves in Brazil, which allows wildlife to progress
with a little human activity during the period of COVID-19 pandemic, there are some not
delimited areas, such as the Amazon rainforest, which suffers more degradation during the
pandemic. With the reduction of environmental inspection, there is happening an increase in
the forest fires, which is resulting in an increase of respiratory diseases among the
inhabitants of the Amazon. This led to an increase in people into hospitals in the capital
Manaus. Thus, it increased the number of people infected with COVID-19.
Despite the northern region of Brazil has almost 5 times fewer people than the southeastern
region of Brazil, it has one of the highest numbers of infected with COVID-19. Besides the
increase of cases of COVID-19, data from the National Institute for Space Research (INPE)
reveal that in April, there was an increase in deforestation alerts in the Amazon. The number
grew 63.75% over the same month last year. However, it is hard to get this information from
INPE. Those data are limited to the deforested area, not being related to other problems of
the region, such as the invasion of indigenous reserves, and lost fauna and flora.
The main problem encountered by our group was the lack of recent data on the activities
taking place in the Amazon, so Integramazon comes up with a proposal to integrate data
obtained by space agencies such as NASA and National Institute for Space Research
(INPE), with data reported by residents, forest rangers and researchers. It aims greater
control and combating outbreaks of fire, deforestation, illegal hunting, and other forms of
problems, such as agglomerations in periods of a pandemic, or invasion of indigenous lands.
There are cases of COVID-19 among the native population who live isolated. It shows how there is contact between people into the Amazon with indigenous people.
The latest data that we have access from the National Institute for Space Research (INPE), and is from 2019, although they have reported on reliable news channels that there was an increase in fires in the first months of 2020 compared to last year. It shows how data open to the public take time to be available.
It is necessary that there is data available to everyone. Our application allows a crossing of various data, allowing more integrated processing that is available nowadays. We aim to protect the forest and those who live in the region. To demonstrate the idea of the project, we used Canva. We also used a website on the free domain provided by NASA’s partner for the NASA Space Apps COVID-19.
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