Victor E. Miyakawa
Program Manager, US Forest Service / International Programs and Trade
Victor Miyakawa is a seasoned expert in information systems for natural resource governance, with over 20 years of experience across Latin America. He specializes in the design and implementation of large-scale information and control systems to support forest and wildlife management, particularly in the context of combating illegal logging and associated trade, as well as promoting data transparency.
He has led technical cooperation programs with national and regional governments in Peru, Colombia, and Ecuador, integrating advanced technologies such as remote sensing, timber identification tools, and forest inventories. His thematic expertise includes geoinformatics, bioinformatics, data sharing platforms, and capacity-building for government agencies, communities, and private sector stakeholders.
Fluent in Spanish and English, Victor also brings strong skills in monitoring and evaluation, multi-stakeholder facilitation, and regional coordination to support environmental governance and information integration efforts aligned with global transparency and conservation goals.

The Geobosques platform is a key tool for forest management in the country of Peru. It provides annual information on deforestation, as well as early warnings of deforestation, every 16 days, allowing monitoring of specific areas of interest to users. Currently, in addition to information on Amazonian forests, it has the first baseline map of the seasonally dry forests of the northern coast of Peru.

Map created by Amazon Georeferenced Socioenvironmental Information Network (RAISG) to map illegal mining in protected territories of the Amazon.

Monitors the advance of gold mining via satellite and radar in the Amazonian region of Madre de Dios in Peru, a country where the “gold rush” has devastated more than 237,000 acres (96,000 hectares) of primary forest over the past 30 years. It can overcome the limitation that satellites encounter when trying to capture photos of the forest on a cloudy day. RAMI’s radar monitoring can “see” through clouds and thus provide information about the forest without weather patterns getting in the way.