The fight against deforestation in Paraguay is getting a boost from an unlikely source: cutting-edge technology and data from space, coupled with the expertise of local forest conservationists.

In 2019, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) organized a one-week training in Paraguay’s capital, Asunción, for twenty international and local experts, like Katherin Patricia Insfrán Chena.

The workshop was part of the Global Remote Sensing Survey, a ground-breaking study developed by FAO in collaboration with the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission and funded by the European Union and Norway's International Climate and Forest Initiative. The Global Survey’s aim was to improve the understanding of forest area trends and drivers of deforestation by combining local expertise with the latest satellite data.  

Part of the work of the survey entailed leveraging cutting-edge tools like Collect Earth Online, an open-source software for viewing and interpreting high-resolution satellite imagery developed by FAO together with Google, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the Spatial Informatics Group of the University of San Francisco, SilvaCarbon and the United States Forest Service. With this and other tools, FAO and more than 800 local experts from 126 countries and territories analysed 400 000 global satellite data samples.

Despite major advances in satellite images and their analytics, field knowledge of local land uses remains essential to correctly identify changes using remote sensing products. This is where Patricia’s deep understanding of her country’s landscapes really shines.