MapBiomas is an initiative of the Climate Observatory and a collaborative network of non-governmental organizations, universities and companies, organized with the objective of using quality and low-cost technology to produce annual series of maps (from 1985 onwards).

MapBiomas Colombia is an initiative coordinated by the Gaia Amazonas Foundation, and was created in conjunction with the Amazonian Network of Geo-referenced Socio-environmental Information (RAISG). Its objective is to generate annual land cover and land use maps for the entire continental surface of Colombia (1985-2022), as an extension of the base built from the methodology developed by MapBiomas Amazonía.

MapBiomas Colombia involves researchers and specialists in remote sensing, programming, ecosystems and land use in Colombia. All work is done using cloud processing through the Google Earth Engine platform.

Land cover and land use maps and Landsat mosaics can be downloaded through this link: MapBiomas Colombia Collections

In this link you will find a tool in Google Earth Engine that allows the download of the complete collection, as well as the download by specific territorial or temporal slices.
Don't forget to download the legend codes at: Legend codes

Each layer represents one year of the time series. For example, in Collection 1, layer 0 = 1985 and layer 37 = 2022.

Large time series and land cover and land use maps generated at the scale MapBiomas Colombia works (30 m pixels) are not practical in vector format. All data processing is done in raster format, pixel by pixel.

There is no such possibility on the MapBiomas Colombia platform. Map vectorization is extremely expensive in terms of computational resources and impractical for the whole territory. The recommended solution, if you want to work with vector, is to download the data, make the territorial or spatial cutout of your interest and then vectorize with your preferred software.

Yes, MapBiomas Colombia data is public and free for non-commercial use or for public interest purposes.

Yes, MapBiomas Colombia collections are available as layers (assets) on the Google Earth Engine platform and can be accessed, processed and analyzed directly on the platform, without the need to download the data.

MapBiomas Colombia data are public and free, you can make use of them by simply referring to the source with the following format: 

"MapBiomas Colombia Project - Collection [version] of annual land cover and land use maps, accessed on [date] through the link: [LINK] " 
"MapBiomas Colombia Project is an initiative of Gaia Amazonas Foundation with multi-institutional co-creation of RAISG and MapBiomas Network to generate annual land cover and land use maps from automatic classification processes applied to satellite images. The full project description can be found at Project

You need to have a Google Earth Engine (GEE) account, which can be registered through the following link: https://earthengine.google.com

By accessing the GEE Code Editor (https://code.earthengine.google.com) you can start scripts to view and process data. In this link you will find examples of scripts to access MapBiomas Colombia data in Google Earth Engine: Tools

The detailed description of the legend is available for download at:

https://colombia.mapbiomas.org/en/codigos-de-la-leyenda/

Yes, land cover and land use statistics for the whole country, biomes, regions, departments and municipalities are available for download at: 
https://colombia.mapbiomas.org/en/estadisticas/

You can access the file with the codes at the following link: 

https://colombia.mapbiomas.org/en/codigos-de-la-leyenda/

Landsat pixels have an average resolution of 30 m, so it is common to associate the area of a pixel to 900 m². But, since the original data of MapBiomas Colombia are created following the representation of the GEE standard (Lat / Long and WGS84), it does not use an equivalent projection (equal area). Therefore, the distance from the target to the Equator line influences the pixel size. Therefore, at continental scale, the calculation of pixel count and multiplication by 900 m² should be avoided. 

In MapBiomas Colombia we apply two methods to calculate the area:

1 - When performed outside Google Earth Engine, we reproduce the datum for the UTM system and calculate the metric value of the central pixel, located at the intersection between the reference 1: 250,000 chart and the area of interest. Then, we count all the pixels within the area of interest and multiply by the reference value, in m², of the central pixel previously calculated. 

2 - When the calculation is performed in Google Earth Engine, we apply the function ee.Image.pixelArea () which generates an image in which the value of each pixel is the area of that pixel in square meters, taking into account possible cartographic distortions.

You can access the description of all the reference maps used by MapBiomas Colombia at: https://colombia.mapbiomas.org/en/mapas-de-referencia/