Mudanças históricas de uso da terra no Brasil para aplicações climáticas e hidrológicas

Historical land use and land cover changes (LULCC) scenarios are important to simulate adequately climatic and hydrological impacts in the context of climate changes. Considering that the Earth’s land cover has been extensively transformed in the past century and due to uncertainties to estimate historical agricultural land use and deforestation evolution, we presented here a historical evolution of land use and land cover classification in the main basins in Brazil, from 1979 to 2010. We used NOAA AVRHH and Terra MODIS images to compute vegetation indices and to apply a decision tree algorithm to create land use and land cover scenarios. The land cover scenarios, available at 1979, 1987/1988, 1992/1993, 2001 and 2009/2010 are reported at spatial resolution of 1-km and describe the evolution of 4 landcover types, including forests, agriculture, pasture/grassland and savannas (cerrados). To validate our findings, we compared the historical remote sensing scenarios to agricultural census and to LANDSAT based land cover maps. The reconstructed scenarios are relevant to understand the impact of land use and land cover changes on in hydrology and the global climate. This research was funded by the The Brazilian Electricity Regulatory Agency (ANEEL).