Every day for more than a year, Ane Alencar bounced her jeep across the potholed dirt roads of Para, Brazil, past miles of silent, ash-black pastures. In the dusty dry months and in the rainy season, when the roads became rivers of mud, she drove to remote farms and cattle ranches to document how much of the rainforest landowners had logged or burned. She'd seen it already, but then again she hadn't. Alencar's treks were part of an experiment to determine whether satellite data—in this case Landsat photography of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon—was accurately portraying conditions on the ground.
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