Monitoring of Gold Mining in the Peruvian Amazon – RAMI Alerts

Deforestation caused by gold mining in Peru has resulted in the loss of more than 100,000 hectares of primary forest in the last three decades. We estimate that, in the southern Peruvian Amazon, more than 30,000 hectares of forest will be lost to mining activities between 2021 and 2024. Those directly affected include mainly people living in indigenous communities and protected areas, farmers and forest concessionaires. However, fishermen, tourists and urban populations, whose food and water sources are contaminated by mercury released as a by-product of gold mining, are also indirectly impacted. The Monitoring of Gold Mining in the Peruvian Amazon (RAMI) service uses satellite imagery, cloud computing and change detection algorithms to efficiently identify potential new mining fronts in priority areas, such as buffer zones of protected areas and native communities. This dataset contains mining deforestation alerts generated by RAMI for the years 2022 and 2023.