Evaluation of the land cover as water management indicator: a case study at Córrego dos Bois sub-basin, Minas Gerais

ABSTRACT

In the present work, we evaluated the occupation of the Córrego dos Bois sub-basin, in the municipality of Oliveira County, Minas Gerais State, in Brazil - based on it, it has been obtained land cover classes, defined areas of permanent preservation, identified the conflict among land use and environmental laws, and calculated environmental indicators. Initially, it was constructed a mosaic of three RapidEye images. The classification method used was the object-based classification with the Ecognition Developer 8.0^® software. The classifier algorithm applied was the nearest neighbor, which takes in account the proximity of segmented objects in an image in the feature space. A random sampling, in some previously defined areas, performed the evaluation of the classification accuracy. The land cover classes obtained were water bodies, coffee farming, Eucalyptus forests, native forests, buildings, mining, pasture, road, bare land and floodplain. It was identified only two categories of preservation permanent areas in the study area: adjacent to rivers and springs. It concludes that the total area of the Córrego dos Bois sub-basin is 1,540.18 hectares, where 40.70% are pastures, 35.84% are coffee plantations, and 18.84% are native forests. The corresponding conflict of the land use in the preservation areas is 25.58%.

Keywords:
vegetal coverage; RapidEye images; environmental indicator