Land Use and Cover Changes in Brazilian Biomes between 1985 and 2018

Abstract

In the last decades, there have been changes in land use and cover in the Brazilian territory, many resulting from anthropic activities. However, these changes impact the environmental system, compromising biodiversity and ecological services. In this context, integrative geographic information about environmental changes in the Biomes allows the identification of the main Spatio-temporal changes in land use and cover and can contribute to efficient environment planning. Thus, this paper proposes to describe and synthesize the Spatio-temporal changes in Brazilian Biomes between 1985-2018 using spatial statistics techniques and Principal Component Analysis with data from the MapBiomas project. It has employed the Google Earth Engine and QGIS for the analysis, with emphasis on spatial statistics and Principal Components Analysis which enabled the identification of the main changes in land use and cover. From the Principal Components Analysis, it was possible to reduce the data set with 34 images to two Principal Components that represent significant percentages of the variance of the original database. The results showed that the Brazilian Biomes had undergone significant changes over 34 years. The main vectors that drove these transformations were anthropic activities, such as urban growth, the advancement of agriculture, and cattle ranching in the countryside. Amazon and Cerrado present the largest area altered in square kilometers. And the fastest changes occurred on Amazon, Cerrado, and Pantanal. This work presents a synthesis of the main patterns and spatial-temporal changes in the use and cover of Brazilian Biomes, which can assist in the national environmental planning.