Abstract
The Soy Moratorium is a pledge agreed to by major soybean companies not to trade soybean produced in deforested areas after 24th July 2006 in the Brazilian Amazon biome. The present study aims to identify soybean planting in these areas using the MOD13Q1 product and TM/Landsat-5 images followed by aerial survey and field inspection. In the 2009/2010 crop year, 6.3 thousand ha of soybean (0.25% of the total deforestation) were identified in areas deforested during the moratorium period. The use of remote sensing satellite images reduced by almost 80% the need for aerial survey to identify soybean planting and allowed monitoring of all deforested areas greater than 25 ha. It is still premature to attribute the recent low deforestation rates in the Amazon biome to the Soy Moratorium, but the initiative has certainly exerted an inhibitory effect on the soybean frontier expansion in this biome.
Highlights
The demand for agricultural products has induced excessive land cover change in recent years
The present study aims to identify soybean crop in deforested areas of the Brazilian Amazon biome based on remote sensing satellite images to detect the presence of annual crops, in a first step, and on aerial survey and field inspection to identify soybean crop, in a second step
Remote sensing images combined with aerial survey identified 6.3 thousand ha of soybean planted in deforested polygons post Soy Moratorium during the 2009/10 crop year
Summary
The demand for agricultural products has induced excessive land cover change in recent years. The consequences of these changes on biogeochemical cycles of the Earth system have attributed a new focus to global change studies [1,2]. The conversion of natural forests to agricultural land has become one of the major issues of current debate on global changes [3]. For large farmers the presence of roads and the price of agricultural products are major factors that influence the conversion of forest to agricultural land. Under a scenario of good prices the recently deforested land will first be cropped with rice for one or two years to fully clear the land, and used for soybean production. When soybean prices are very attractive the recently deforested land will be intensively mechanized for land clearing and soybean will be cultivated in the first year immediately after deforestation [13]
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