Gilberto Camara Neto

Prof. Dr. Gilberto Câmara is a researcher in Geoinformatics, Spatial Data Science and Land Use Modeling, and works as a researcher at the Center for Agribusiness Studies of the Getúlio Vargas Foundation (GV-AGRO) and Senior Collaborating Researcher at the National Institute for Space Research (INPE). He is internationally recognized for promoting free access to geospatial data and for establishing efficient satellite monitoring of the Brazilian Amazon rainforest. He was general coordinator of Earth Observation at INPE from October 2001 to December 2005 and director of INPE from December 2005 to May 2012. During his tenure as director of INPE, he carried out the main part of the development of the CBERS-3, CBERS-4 and Amazonia-1 satellites. He executed more than R$800 million in contracts with the national industry in values updated to 2024. He created the Earth System Science Center, the Amazon Regional Center and the Space Climate program, and obtained funding for a new high-performance supercomputer for INPE. He was responsible for the policy of free access to INPE satellite images and the opening up of PRODES and DETER deforestation data to society as a whole. Under his guidance, the INPE team achieved major advances in monitoring land use changes using remote sensing, leading to a major reduction in deforestation in the Amazon. The leading scientific journal Nature called this reduction in deforestation the biggest environmental success story in decades.Working together with researchers from IIASA (International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis), Gilberto led the Brazilian team that developed the technical studies that supported the government's official commitments on land use in Brazil's Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) to the Paris Agreement on Climate Change. He has supervised 29 doctoral theses and 28 master's dissertations and published more than 150 peer-reviewed articles that have been cited more than 18,400 times with an h-index of 59 and an i-10 index of 179 (Google Scholar, December 2024). He was a member of the Scientific Committee of the Global Land Project from 2006 to 2011. From June 2013 to May 2015, he held the Brazil Chair at the University of Münster (Germany), with support from the Brazilian agency CAPES. From 2015 to 2018, he represented the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP) at the Belmont Forum of global change research funding agencies and was one of the co-chairs of the Belmont Forum (2016-2017). He was Director of the Secretariat of the Group on Earth Observations (GEO) from July 2018 to June 2021. As Director of the GEO Secretariat, he applied his Open Science vision to help developing nations better use Earth observation data to improve social well-being and sustainable development practices.In recognition of his work, Gilberto was appointed Doctor honoris causa by the University of Münster (Germany) and Chevalier de la Ordre National du Mérite in France. He received the Global Citizen Award from the Global Spatial Data Infrastructure Association. He is a senior member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). He received the William T. Pecora Award from NASA and USGS for leadership in broad and open access to remote sensing data.He is currently leading the research and development of Earth observation big data analysis technology, applying deep learning and machine learning techniques to land use and land cover classification with satellite image time series. The technology is consolidated in the free software SITS, an R package that is used by the INPE, EMBRAPA and IBGE teams in the Brazil Data Cube environment to produce the Brazilian government's official land use maps. (Source: Lattes Curriculum)