Abstract
The eastern Brazilian Amazon contains many isolated ferruginous savanna ecosystem patches (locally known as ‘canga vegetation’) located on ironstone rocky outcrops on the top of plateaus and ridges, surrounded by tropical rainforests. In the Carajás Mineral Province (CMP), these outcrops contain large iron ore reserves that have been exploited by opencast mining since the 1980s. The canga vegetation is particularly impacted by mining, since the iron ores that occur are associated with this type of vegetation and currently, little is known regarding the extent of canga vegetation patches before mining activities began. This information is important for quantifying the impact of mining, in addition to helping plan conservation programmes. Here, land cover changes of the Canga area in the CMP are evaluated by estimating the pre-mining area of canga patches and comparing it to the actual extent of canga patches. We mapped canga vegetation using geographic object-based image analysis (GEOBIA) from 1973 Landsat-1 MSS, 1984 and 2001 Landsat-5 TM, and 2016 Landsat-8 OLI images, and found that canga vegetation originally occupied an area of 144.2 km2 before mining exploitation. By 2016, 19.6% of the canga area was lost in the CMP due to conversion to other land-use types (mining areas, pasturelands). In the Carajás National Forest (CNF), located within the CMP, the original canga vegetation covered 105.2 km2 (2.55% of the CNF total area), and in 2016, canga vegetation occupied an area of 77.2 km2 (1.87%). Therefore, after more than three decades of mineral exploitation, less than 20% of the total canga area was lost. Currently, 21% of the canga area in the CMP is protected by the Campos Ferruginosos National Park. By documenting the initial extent of canga vegetation in the eastern Amazon and the extent to which it has been lost due to mining operations, the results of this work are the first step towards conserving this ecosystem.
Highlights
Several studies have investigated conservation and threats to biodiversity and ecosystem services in tropical rainforests [1]
We aim to evaluate the land-cover and land-use (LCLU) changes in the canga vegetation of the Carajas Mineral Province (CMP) during the cycle of mining operations in order to quantify the impact of mining on canga vegetation
The multiresolution classification based on the geographic object-based image analysis (GEOBIA) analysis effectively classified the canga vegetation and its related mines
Summary
Several studies have investigated conservation and threats to biodiversity and ecosystem services in tropical rainforests [1]. Deforestation rates in the Amazon, the largest remaining tropical forest in the world, have been well studied [2]. In the Carajas Mineral Province (CMP), located in the Eastern Amazon, these ferruginous outcrop savanna ecosystems are called “canga” [3] and occur within a dense forest matrix typical of the Amazon rainforest biome [4]. There are other types of open vegetation in the Amazon (Fig 1), but they are different from canga vegetation and are determined by different soil conditions (lateritic or very poor sandy soils).
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