Eucalyptus silviculture in the state of Goiás: a historical record through remote sensing

Abstract

Global demand for food and energy has grown intensely in recent decades, facing an estimated 10 billion people in the world by 2050. Along with this phenomenon, there are also growing areas for planting grains and commercial forests. In this context, the main objective of this work is to map the areas of forestry in the state of Goiás by remote sensing techniques, between the years of 2002 and 2015, verifying the location and quantification of the main planting areas. Therefore, images from the Operational Land Imager (OLI) of the Landsat-8 satellite were processed in the Arcgis® and ENVI® softwares. Thus through a  supervised digital classification by the maximum likelihood method, we estimated the area with planted forests in the state. After the classification, it was verified that there were considerable advances in terms of areas planted in Goiás, noting that in 2002 there were approximately 50,425 ha of planted forest, reaching 162,516 ha in 2015. The Goiás mesoregions with the largest forest plantations were the South, East and North, while South and East are the largest producers of firewood and timber. The spatial distribution of the plantations is characterized by small areas and non-vertical production of the producers. This unprecedented and strategic information can better guide the expansion and increase the productivity of the sector, reconciling this process with the environmental conservation of the Cerrado biome.