Many of you have asked about the news of fires in the amazon forest and may have a lot of other questions to ask. There are many questions and many different analyses to be made. For the purposes of this presentation, I will propose the following question: “Is the amazon forest being burned in large rates?”

I will demonstrate a geoprocessing task using unwieldy data from the NASA FIRMS system (MODIS and VIIRS) and FOSS4G tools to try to answer the proposed question. What I will NOT do is discuss politics, ecology, or causes and effects. This is a complex subject and I believe one should ask questions focused on the decision one has to make. What are you trying to decide? What questions should you ask to help you in your decision? Maybe this presentation will provide you with a workflow and a few tools to do your own research.