Trazo is the Spanish word for brushstroke, from the verb trazar; to trace, to draw, and to plot. By tracing fields by hand in satellite imagery, we can choose the most powerful field training data for creating robust, generalizable field boundary detection models. Each sketched field in our dataset adds knowledge about the wide diversity of agricultural systems in South America. These sketches teach models the culture of agriculture and how landscapes differ.
Trazo echoes the English word “trace”: to follow a path, uncover origins and make hidden connections legible. Trazo is both about creating powerful, diverse training data and the aim of tracing commodities through the supply chain, so that agriculture can be monitored for deforestation.
Visualized on this map are fields generated by the Trazo3 model from 2024 in Mato Grosso, Brazil. Each field is tagged with the mode Mapbiomas land cover value.
Read the technical note, “Field Boundaries of South America” to learn about Trazo.
Trazo includes training data, model checkpoints produced from the training data, and field boundaries produced by Trazo models.
The Github for Trazo can be found here and the FTW repository can be found here.
This dataset was produced as part of a collaboration with World Resources Institute (WRI) and Arizona State University with support from the Land and Carbon Lab. This work was funded through a Walmart Foundation grant. Trazo is a direct extension of Fields of The World.