The Amazon, largest expanse of tropical forest on Earth, has been experiencing rapid land cover change as a consequence of economic development.
In 1998, the Brazilian science community, joined by an international team of scientists, established the Large-scale Biosphere-Atmosphere Experiment in Amazonia (LBA) to study how Amazonia currently functions as a regional entity within the larger Earth system, and how changes in land use and climate will affect the biological, physical, and chemical functioning of the region's ecosystem. NASA's Terrestrial Ecology and Land Use-Land Cover Change Programs sponsored a group of the LBA projects that formed the LBA-ECO (formerly LBA-Ecology) Program.
Along with the final data products, the ORNL DAAC now hosts the LBA-ECO Project website, as it existed in 2013.