What happened
MapBiomas publishes yearly land-cover maps of Brazil from 1985, made by classifying Landsat images pixel by pixel with machine-learning algorithms. In 2017 an operation of the environmental police and state prosecutors found 63.76 ha of Atlantic Forest cleared on an estate in Palmas, Paraná. For one area, the police noted that they could not tell when the clearing had happened. In the civil action that followed, a court-appointed expert visited the site and compared historical Google Earth images with MapBiomas maps. The expert dated one clearing to 2005. The expert also found that land use had kept the forest from regrowing after 2008, when the company bought the estate. On 5 August 2025 the Court of Justice of Paraná relied on that report. It rejected the defense that the area had been consolidated farmland before July 2008 and upheld the duty to repair. It cut collective moral damages from R$100,000 to R$70,000. The court did not assess the maps' accuracy, and the expert also used the site visit and other imagery.
Sources
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Court document, by authors with no tie to the system.
Tribunal de Justiça do Estado do Paraná (TJPR), 4ª Câmara Cível. Apelação Cível nº 0000313-27.2021.8.16.0123 (Palmas), Rel. Des. Wellington Emanuel Coimbra de Moura. Judgment of 5 August 2025, published 11 August 2025. Appeal partly granted: the duty to repair was upheld and collective moral damages were cut to R$70,000.
Pela análise da cobertura do solo com as imagens históricas do MapBiomas é possível inferir que a supressão ocorreu no ano de 2005, pois no ano de 2006 a área apresentava uma porção com cobertura com Mosaico de Usos.
os fatos então apurados dão conta de conduta impeditiva de regeneração natural da floresta nativa do bioma Mata Atlântica, que ocorreu também após o ano de 2008
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Other, by the makers. Context or contrary evidence.
MapBiomas. Visão geral da metodologia (methodology overview of the MapBiomas Brasil land use and land cover maps). Archived copy of 2025 in the Internet Archive.
Todos os mapas anuais de cobertura e uso da terra do MapBiomas são produzidos a partir da classificação pixel a pixel de imagens Landsat. Todo processo é feito com extensivos algoritmos de aprendizagem de máquina (machine learning) através da plataforma Google Earth Engine
Details
AI system
- Workflow
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A court-appointed expert visited the site and compared historical Google Earth images with MapBiomas land-cover maps. The expert read the year-by-year land-cover classes to date the clearing and the land use that followed.
Follow-up
- Conditions for replication
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The yearly maps must cover the years in dispute. The court must accept the expert's dating when the site itself gives no date for the clearing.
Entry details
- Sector
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Environmental enforcement: Atlantic Forest clearing.
- Purpose
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MapBiomas built its land-cover collection to map land cover and land use across Brazil for each year from Landsat images.
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Cite this record
Peter H. Vartanian. (2026). Court expert dates a Paraná forest clearing with MapBiomas maps (AIBD-1139). Artificial Intelligence Benefits Database, edition of 1 November 2026. https://petervartanian.xyz/aibd/records/AIBD-1139.html (archived at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/AADSII, version 7.0)