Overlays in Practice

Overlay operations provide the foundation for spatial decision-making and planning across numerous domains, from urban and environmental planning to business strategy. By leveraging overlay operations, spatial patterns and relationships can be better understood, aiding in sophisticated spatial analysis and insightful decision-making. In this lesson, we are going to use overlays to assess how much the Amazon biome represents in terms of the area of its adjacent countries.

Amazon biome

The Amazon biome is often considered the lungs of the Earth. It's the world’s largest tropical rainforest, covering about 6.7 million square kilometers across nine countries: Brazil, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana (figure below). It’s an area with incredible biodiversity; it is home to an estimated 400 billion individual trees representing 16,000 species, about 2.5 million insect species, over 2,000 mammals and birds, and tens of thousands of other plant and animal species. Many of these species are not found anywhere else on Earth.