Análise de correspondência entre mapas de vegetação florestal do bioma Cerrado

The Brazilian Cerrado (savanna) biome covers almost 200 million hectares in Brazil. Besides its importance in conservation (i.e. biodiversity, carbon and water cycles) and in the country’s economy (i.e. agricultural production), the remaining vegetation of the Cerrado has been poorly monitored. This paper presents the results of the MapBiomas Collection 1 forest mapping initiative for the Cerrado and compares it with the most recent map of forest cover available for this biome (TerraClass Cerrado). The MapBiomas initiative uses the Landsat catalog, Google technology and cloud processing power to generate annual land cover maps for the entire Brazil in a fast, free and iterative way. For the Collection 1, the initiative focused in producing annual forest maps from 2008 to 2015 using median composite annual mosaics, and an empirical decision tree based in fractions and indices produced with spectral mixing model analysis. The results suggested a reduction of 10% in forest cover of Cerrado from 2009 to 2015. The analysis indicated a spatial and temporal consistency among the annual forest maps, as well as with the reference map (TerraClass) with 66% of concordance. The comparisons between these forest cover maps are fundamental to indicate areas where the decision tree parameters need to be adjusted to improve the mapping results. The Collection 2 mapping is already being prepared and is expected to provide better levels of concordance and accuracy.