Abstract
Brazil has a monitoring system to track annual forest conversion in the Amazon and most recently to monitor the Cerrado biome. However, there is still a gap of annual land use and land cover (LULC) information in all Brazilian biomes in the country. Existing countrywide efforts to map land use and land cover lack regularly updates and high spatial resolution time-series data to better understand historical land use and land cover dynamics, and the subsequent impacts in the country biomes. In this study, we described a novel approach and the results achieved by a multi-disciplinary network called MapBiomas to reconstruct annual land use and land cover information between 1985 and 2017 for Brazil, based on random forest applied to Landsat archive using Google Earth Engine. We mapped five major classes: forest, non-forest natural formation, farming, non-vegetated areas, and water. These classes were broken into two sub-classification levels leading to the most comprehensive and detailed mapping for the country at a 30 m pixel resolution. The average overall accuracy of the land use and land cover time-series, based on a stratified random sample of 75,000 pixel locations, was 89% ranging from 73 to 95% in the biomes. The 33 years of LULC change data series revealed that Brazil lost 71 Mha of natural vegetation, mostly to cattle ranching and agriculture activities. Pasture expanded by 46% from 1985 to 2017, and agriculture by 172%, mostly replacing old pasture fields. We also identified that 86 Mha of the converted native vegetation was undergoing some level of regrowth. Several applications of the MapBiomas dataset are underway, suggesting that reconstructing historical land use and land cover change maps is useful for advancing the science and to guide social, economic and environmental policy decision-making processes in Brazil.
Highlights
Our society is highly dependent on a functional and stable land system for food production, and to access natural resources including water, timber, fiber, ore and fuel, among other ecosystem services and goods [1]
The Amazon biome had 95.13% average global accuracy, which was the highest accuracy at class Level 1, followed by the Atlantic Forest biome with 87.3%
Our analysis showed that 323.4 Mha in the Amazon biome, or 94.6% of the total land use and land cover (LULC) that did not change, was represented by natural forest formation (Table 7)
Summary
Our society is highly dependent on a functional and stable land system for food production, and to access natural resources including water, timber, fiber, ore and fuel, among other ecosystem services and goods [1]. Brazil is one of the richest biodiversity countries in the world [7] with six unique biomes: Amazon, Atlantic Forest, Caatinga, Cerrado, Pampa and Pantanal These biomes possess large carbon stocks in their forest [8] and soils [9], and possess the largest global reserves of freshwater [10]. The Atlantic Forest (111 Mha, i.e., 13% of the country) is the Brazilian biome that suffered the most extensive LULC change in the past, dating back to colonial history in the sixteenth century [16,17] This biome is highly fragmented by roads and urban centers [18], and immersed in a large agriculture matrix, resulting in 11.7% of old secondary forest cover (i.e., >30 years) [19]
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