deforestation – are causing a release of forcing agents that likely result in a net warming effect. In 2022 the supreme court of Ecuador decided that "“under no circumstances can a project be carried out that generates excessive sacrifices to the collective rights of communities and nature.” It also required the government to respect the opinion of Indigenous peoples of the Americas about different industrial projects on their land. Advocates of the decision argue that it will have consequences far beyond Ecuador. In general, ecosystems are in better shape when indigenous peoples own or manage the land. Remote sensing The use of remotely sensed data is dramatically improving conservationists' knowledge of the Amazon basin. Given the objectivity and lowered costs of satellite-based land cover and -change analysis, it appears likely that remote sensing technology will be an integral part of assessing the extents, locations and damage of deforestation in the basin. Furthermore, remote sensing is the best and perhaps only possible way to study the Amazon on a large scale. The use of remote sensing for the conservation of the Amazon is also being used by the indigenous tribes of the basin to protect their tribal lands from commercial interests. Using handheld GPS devices and programs like Google Earth, members of the Trio Tribe, who live in the rainforests of southern Suriname, map out their ancestral lands to help strengthen their territorial claims. Currently, most tribes in the Amazon do not have clearly defined boundaries, making it easier for commercial ventures to target their territories. To accurately map the Amazon's biomass and subsequent carbon-related emissions, the classification of tree growth stages within different parts of the forest is crucial. In 2006, Tatiana Kuplich organized the trees of the Amazon into four categories: mature forest, regenerating forest [less than three years], regenerating forest [between three and five years of regrowth], and regenerating forest [eleven to eighteen years of continued development]. The researcher used a combination of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and Thematic Mapper (TM) to accurately place the different portions of the Amazon into one of the four classifications. In 2005, parts of the Amazon basin experienced the worst drought in one hundred years, and there were indications that 2006 may have been a second successive year of drought. A 2006 article in the UK newspaper The Independent reported the Woods Hole Research Center results, showing that the forest in its