Dinâmicas territoriais: uso e ocupação das terras da Bacia Hidrográfica do Rio Brilhante-MS, a expansão da cana-de-açúcar

Abstract

The areas of sugar cane monoculture have increasingly expanded, especially at the expense of the conversion of agricultural and pasture fields and such issue has seized several concerns related to this new springing scenario. Since 1980, there has been an increase around 656.336 hectares of sugar cane planted areas in the state of Mato Grosso do Sul. Under this perspective, this manuscript aimed to identify and to map up the areas of sugarcane cultivation through remote sensing images and geo-processing techniques as well as to evaluate the evolution of the sugarcane planted area in two scenarios (2001 and 2015) whose periods this activity was increasingly intense. For this purpose, we picked as unity of analysis the Rio Brilhante hydrographic basin. Aiming to identify the temporal changes, we used the Landsat satellite pictures by comparing the scenarios from the years of 2001 and 2015. For the land classification we opted for the Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE) method as for the vegetation we opted for the NDVI (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index). The geo-systemic characteristics (geology, relief, climate, vegetation, soil and land use and coverage) showed that both expansions of sugarcane and other human activities is bonded to the basin’s physical characteristics which favors the economic occupation of such area. Recently 77% of the basin’s area is occupied by agricultural cultivation. The sum of all the categories of human activities (pastures, soil exposed and urbanized area) shows that the economic use of such lands is consolidated in 86.9% of the total area. Thus, this study points that the use of techniques and remote sensing tools, like NDVI, when worked together with the field research are extremely efficient for identifying the areas of the sugarcane cultivation as for determining which are the indicators of both social, economic and territorial dynamics that have the highest impact over the environmental services and, finally, for subsidizing posterior actions related to environmental planning.