Mapping the Cerrado’s Vegetation Cover – A Review of Remote Sensing Initiatives
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Abstract
The Cerrado is the second largest Brazilian biome, being recognized as the most biodiverse savanna in the world. Beginning in 1970, the land use and land cover dynamics in the biome have been characterized by extensive agricultural activities, resulting in historically higher deforestation rates than the Amazon biome. This scenario reinforces the need to investigate the methodology initiatives of the Cerrado’s vegetation cover, aiming to identify the gaps and challenges that still exist for the advancement of scientific knowledge in the Remote Sensing (RS) field. To this end, this review article identified 15 initiatives that mapped the biome’s vegetation at different scales, periods, and legend levels. The first was the Radam/RadamBrasil project, in the 1970s. However, it was not until the 2000s that Cerrado began to have more visibility, with the emergence of larger and more targeted initiatives for the biome (PROBIO, Conservation International). Recently, new initiatives (MapBiomas, PRODES) have stood out for incorporating different methodologies that have followed the computational evolution of the Remote Sensing techniques. The research carried out in this article identified that the discrimination of different land cover types in the biome is still one of the main challenges to be overcome, especially regarding the non-forest phytophysiognomies as well as the land-use classes that are spectrally similar, such as pasture. This study aims to aggregate details of the main initiatives for mapping the Cerrado vegetation, as well as their methodologies, challenges encountered, such as the difficulty in discriminating its vegetation types, and further discussions and future prospects in the field of RS.
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