In its third edition, the award received 160 works that cite or use data from MapBiomas initiatives

Thursday, February 11, 2021

Entries for the 3rd edition of the MapBiomas Award closed last Sunday (7) with a record number of submissions. There were 160 entries for the three categories: General, Youth and Outstanding Applications for Public Policy. The 60% increase in the number of entries at such a challenging time in all areas - academia, the public and private sectors and the third sector - impressed the organizing committee.

"With each edition of the MapBiomas Award, the number of participants, the variety of regions and also the quality of the work increase. This growth goes hand in hand with the advancement of MapBiomas products, including new applications for both public policies and science in the country. And the works entered for this award reflect this," says MapBiomas' scientific coordinator, Júlia Shimbo. 

Entries came from 25 of Brazil's 26 states and the Federal District. Only Acre did not participate. Last year, there were 17 states, and in the first edition, 11 states. This year there were also entries from France, Portugal, the United Kingdom, New Zealand and the Netherlands.

The 3rd edition of the MapBiomas Prize is being held in partnership with the Ciência Hoje Institute. Carla Madureira, professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) and editor of the magazine Ciência Hoje, the project's scope is noteworthy: "When an initiative like this promotes an important award, whose scope goes beyond national borders, that says a lot. The MapBiomas Award opens up a window of initiatives that seek, through a complex temporal cube of thematic data, to make contributions to understanding phenomena of different kinds."

All the entries will be assessed by a committee of experts. After stages of reading and drawing up independent opinions on the entries, the finalists will be selected and announced in April. The final results will be announced the following month and the awards will be presented.

This year, papers could be submitted that cited or used data from any of the MapBiomas initiatives - such as the MapBiomas Brasil, MapBiomas Amazônia and MapBiomas Chaco collections or information from MapBiomas Alerta, MapBiomas Árida and Geocovid MapBiomas. 

"Initiatives aimed at generating data that can be made widely available and free of charge are fundamental for building diverse knowledge, which is far from limited to scientific studies. Much of this data has become, or can become, important information that encourages scientific dissemination in a variety of contexts," says Professor Carla Madureira. 

This year's edition will reward the winners with R$ 50,000 (divided, according to the notice, the winners of the 1st and 2nd place awards in the General and Youth categories and the Outstanding Applications for Public Policy). In addition, the winners will receive an annual subscription to the magazine Ciência Hoje and a scholarship for a course on geoprocessing satellite images using Google Earth Engine promoted by Solved.

Visit the MapBiomas Award website to find out more about this edition and the winners of previous editions.