Land use change in the Universidade Federal de Lavras campus, Minas Gerais State, Brazil

Abstract

In 100 years of history, the campus of the University has been urbanized each year, mainly after 1964, when the school became a Federal establishment. Although aerial photographs of the UFLA campus were taken in 1964, 1971, 1979 and 1985, until this late date no mapping had not been performed to assess how changes have occurred over the past years. The last time that the campus was photographed was in 1985 and there was no knowledge of the present distribution and area of such urban land, agricultural land, forest land, water and other uses. This way, a Quickbird satellite imagery have been taken in April 2009. Thus, using Quickbird satellite imagery and 1985, 1964 aerial photographs were produced land use and land cover mappings for these times of the UFLA campus in order to quantify, review and assess the changes in this period. The classes were distributed in five categories: urban areas, forest land, agricultural land, water and other uses. The boundaries of the classes were manually done using vector based line following digitization. The major land uses in the campus were agricultural crops and pasture. The forest land areas increased from 1964 to 2009. In the year of 2009 the campus presents good vegetation coverage (forest land, pine and eucalyptus). From 1964 to 2009 the main use category was agricultural land but there was a gradual reduction of this use over the past years. The urban areas have been expanded following the growth of number of students in the years 1964, 1985 and 2009 that was 108, 1,760 and 5,338, respectively. Finally, the aerial photographs and the satellite image allowed tracking very well the evidences of these changes.