Agricultural land use and cover change in the Cerrado/Amazon ecotone: A case study of the upper Teles Pires River basin

ABSTRACT The upper Teles Pires River basin is a key hydrological resource for the state of Mato Grosso, but has suffered rapid land use and cover change. The basin includes areas of Cerrado biome, as well as transitional areas between the Amazon and Cerrado vegetation types, with intensive large-scale agriculture widely-spread throughout the region. The objective of this study was to explore the spatial and temporal dynamics of land use and cover change from 1986 to 2014 in the upper Teles Pires basin using remote sensing and GIS techniques. TM (Thematic Mapper) and TIRS (Thermal Infrared Sensor) sensor images aboard the Landsat 5 and Landsat 8, respectively, were employed for supervised classification using the “Classification Workflow” in ENVI 5.0. To evaluate classification accuracy, an error matrix was generated, and the Kappa, overall accuracy, errors of omission and commission, user accuracy and producer accuracy indexes calculated. The classes showing greatest variation across the study period were “Agriculture” and “Rainforest”. Results indicated that deforested areas are often replaced by pasture and then by agriculture, while direct conversion of forest to agriculture occured less frequently. The indices with satisfactory accuracy levels included the Kappa and Global indices, which showed accuracy levels above 80% for all study years. In addition, the producer and user accuracy indices ranged from 59-100% and 68-100%, while the errors of omission and commission ranged from 0-32% and 0-40.6%, respectively. RESUMO A bacia hidrográfica do alto Teles Pires é estratégica e de grande importância para o estado de Mato Grosso e vem sofrendo mudanças significativas em seu uso e ocupação do solo. A bacia está inserida no bioma Cerrado, bem como em áreas de transição entre os biomas Amazônia e Cerrado, com intensa atividade agropecuária em toda sua extensão. O objetivo do presente trabalho foi estudar a dinâmica espaço-temporal das mudanças do uso e ocupação do solo na bacia do alto Teles Pires entre 1986 a 2014. Para tanto, imagens do sensor TM (Thematic Mapper) e TIRS (Thermal Infrared Sensor) a bordo dos satélites Landsat 5 e Landsat 8, respectivamente, foram empregadas para uma classificação supervisionada utilizando o “Classification Workflow” disponível no software ENVI 5.0. Para avaliar a acurácia da classificação, uma matriz de erros foi gerada e os índices Kappa, exatidão Global e os erros de omissão, comissão, usuário e produtor foram calculados.