MAPPING LAND USE AND LAND COVER CHANGES IN A REGION OF SUGARCANE EXPANSION USING TM AND MODIS DATA

Abstract

Land use/cover change (LUCC) is a cross-disciplinary research field in which remote sensing and geographic information systems (GIS) techniques have played an important role. Sugarcane expansion - a major LUCC process in Brazil - has been monitored by INPE's CANASAT project since 2003 (http://www.dsr.inpe.br/canasat/). In this study, an assessment of land use/cover conversion is presented in a region of important sugarcane expansion, the município of Barretos, in São Paulo State, in the 2003-2009 period. Detection of land use/cover changes is performed by classification of 2003 land use/cover and comparing 2003 classes with 2009 CANASAT maps. Land use/cover classification uses Landsat TM, and MODIS EVI2 time series, and two different techniques, segmentation followed by supervised classification, and object-based image analysis (OBIA) combining remotely sensed imagery and ancillary data. Results show that at least 40% of the increases in sugarcane area were due to conversion of pasture land; comparison of the two classification techniques shows better results by the OBIA technique, but both approaches agreed that most sugarcane expansion occurred on pasture land.