Hii Joao,

If I have understood you correctly, you want to show how much forest got converted to different crop types in each year. With cross tabulation method you can calculate the area which converted from forest to other land uses within a time period as well as show in maps. Please let me know if this is what you want to do, I can send you papers/ method how to do it.

Thanks

Dear Chitrini,

References for GIS data-processing methods would be good but even better would be either the results of the GIS analysis or the GIS source data itself.

Such data is reported /*in visual formal*/ in papers such as Barona et al. (2010) The role of pasture and soybean in deforestation of the Brazilian Amazon, Environmental Research Letters 5 024002 or Espindola et al (2012) COMBINING SATELLITE REMOTE SENSING AND CENSUS DATA TO QUANTIFY AGRICULTURAL LAND USE CHANGE IN THE BRAZILIAN AMAZON, Revista Brasileira de Cartografia (2012) N 0 64/5: 737-747.

Other documents such as Coutinho et al (2013) Uso e cobertura da terra nas áreas

desflorestadas da Amazônia Legal - TerraClass 2008, Embrapa and INPE, Sao Paulo, Brasil report land use for a single year at the state level (2008 in this case).

Yet other documents, such as the official report MCT (2010 ) Inventário Brasileiro de Emissões Antrópicas por Fontes e Remoções por Sumidouros de Gases de Efeito Estufa não Controlados pelo Protocolo de Montreal (around page 240) report allocation of deforestation for a multi-year period (from 1994 to 2002 in this case).

I would like to know if there is some publication which reports yearly allocation of deforestation to land use for each state or, if that is not available, then whether a GIS time series of land use in the Amazon can be found somewhere. I'm not a GIS expert and I need this data as an input to a different study.

Thanks in advance

It depends on the years of your analysis and your analysis resolution. Between 2005 and 2009 I could do this at quite high resolution using ESA GlobCover as a prepackaged solution. For longer time spans I could do this using at a coarser resolution using MODIS 12 and 13 (https://lpdaac.usgs.gov/products/modis_products_table) as a prepackaged solution. Or alternately I could get high-res (say 30 or 60m) back to 1973 annually using the landsat data either processing myself or using prepackaged products from GLCF. Getting to exact crop type (as opposed to just crop) may need a little more work but can be achieved using the data. Then just build the correlation matrix. Expect some noise.

Hansen et al. recently published (Science, Nov. 2013) the global mapping of forest loss/change (classified as gain/loss/both gain and loss) using a comprehensive LandSat archive, for the period 2000 - 2012.

Hansen et al. 2013, "High-Resolution Global Maps of 21st-Century Forest Cover Change," Science 15 November 2013:, Vol. 342 no. 6160 pp. 850-853, DOI: 10.1126/science.1244693

Their paper is available here:

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6160/850

The data should be useable to calculate forested change. The data can be viewed interactively , and ultimately will be available for download, at:

http://earthenginepartners.appspot.com/science-2013-global-forest

Hope this is helpful.

May be ortophoto could be used for this purpose. These is an aerial photograph geometrically corrected ("orthorectified") such that the scale is uniform: the photo has the same lack of distortion as a map. Unlike an uncorrected aerial photograph, an orthophotograph can be used to measure true distances, because it is an accurate representation of the Earth's surface, having been adjusted for topographic relief,[1] lens distortion, and camera tilt.

You may also try to explore different vegetation indices in ENVI and ArcGis platforms to detect the changes that have occurred. At the same aerial photographs for that region would be very helpful in making comparisons across different years. Good luck.

Caro Joao,

To the question "I would like to know if there is some publication which reports yearly allocation of deforestation to land use for each state or, if that is not available, then whether a GIS time series of land use in the Amazon can be found somewhere. I'm not a GIS expert and I need this data as an input to a different study. ", I think the answer is negative for annual state-level stats.

You've already got hold of the most recent publications; I would also check the World Bank site for more analyses (usually their analyses lack sophisticated spatial methods, but they tend to be broad-scale and coherent in theoretical terms, even if they can be disputed in some cases; in contrast, you may find most large-area analyses derived from satellite imagery theoretically poor, but spatially adequate).

As you know well, to correlate Agric production and Deforestation, you have to adapt your methods to data availability, depending on the exact objectives and scales of your analyses. In general, I think you should take into account that (i) yearly, spatially explicit, large-area deforestation data (conf. PRODES, apud Espindola, apud TERRACLASS, cited by you) are available ONLY for what is roughly called 'forest' areas, leaving unmapped all of the cerrado - roughly 20% of the Legal Amazonia, where a large part of agriculture is concentrated - (ii) there are probably no datasets for defor or agric production presenting adequate assessments of uncertainties for their stats - this can make these data nearly useless for several classes of problems: you might want to assess that, in particular, if your problem is defined in terms of interannual variations (iii) data from the Agricultural Censuses are not appropriate if you need annual stats, and frequently they are difficult to intercompare, due to significant changes in data categories and collection methods; however, they are reported at the municipal level for all of the Amazonia (and Brasil), and you can download them from the IBGE site (www.ibge.gov.br; also www.sidra.ibge.gov.br, I think).

If you want to study correlation between these phenomena, you can find the deforestation figures within the INPE PRODES site and the agricultural figures in the IBGE pesquisa agricola municipal.

But you would have two issues do solve:

1. not sure that the "state" is the correct scale for this kind of analysis, for states in the Amazon are huge

2. you cannot assume exactly what a deforestation ha has become... only with fine grain satellite iamgery analysis you can ensure that this deforestation ha is now soybean or pasture

Additionnally, be aware that crops tend to change from year to year in function of market price, and that in some systems there may be 2 or more crops in the same field in the same year...

Good luck

FMLT

In case you don't have PRODES URL:

http://www.obt.inpe.br/prodes/index.php

Dear Stuart, Ben, Cimpoies, Ahmed, Diogenes and François-Michel,

Thank you all very much for your suggestions.

François-Michel: In this study we need to integrate physical deforestation data and economic trade data. As spatial resolution increases the physical data improves but the economic data becomes less robust. The state-level is a trade-off.

Stuart: Due to consistency between datasets, the study is from 2000-2011.

Diogenes: we already tried to map the PRODES deforestation data with the IBGE/agricultural census data and the results were not good.

Ben: As far as I could see the Hansen paper does not report the land use that follows deforestation. Did I miss something?

Cimpoies and Ahmed: I need some time to look at the GIS stuff you're talking about (as I said before I'm not an expert).

Again, many thanks!

As it has already been mentioned, there is PRODES for the deforestation part (annual monitoring) and TerraClass for the land use. However, TerraClass is limited to land use change that happened in deforested lands (picked by PRODES) and has fewer time steps (before 2002, 2002-2008, 2008-2010). If you want to pick the land cover change for the Cerrado portion of the Legal Amazon try PMDBBS (http://goo.gl/Iw6nee).

Finally, there is SimBrasil (http://www.csr.ufmg.br/simbrasil/), a land use change modeling initiative by Univ. Federal de Minas Gerais which is simulating the dynamics of agriculture in Brasil. Try contacting the lead researcher ([email protected]) to check if they are reporting the link between land cover and land use change.

Let us know what you end up using...

E

Alternatively, if you have time series data on the different variables, you could specify the dependent and independent variables, standardize them and run multiple linear regressions. This can easily be achieved in R or SPSS. You could read the paper by Epule et al, (2011), title Forest loss triggers in Cameroon: an analysis based on multiple linear regression approach.Published in J of Geography and Geology.

Thank you all for for your help.

Stuart Hamilton provided MODIS land cover transition matrices (by year and state), and in the next few weeks I'll be trying to square this data with the rest of the data sets mentioned above.

When I can figure out land use transition matrices from these disparate sources I'll make and excel file and upload it, as it may be useful to others.

Dear João, I have a paper concernig some data you need.

I hope that I can help you.

Ruviaro et al. Market-oriented cattle traceability in the Brazilian Legal Amazon. DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2013.08.019