DEFORESTATION POLYGON ASSESSMENT TOOL: PROVIDING COMPREHENSIVE INFORMATION ON DEFORESTATION IN THE BRAZILIAN CERRADO BIOME

Abstract

Considered a conservation hotspot of the world biodiversity and a key region for the agriculture production in Brazil, the Cerrado biome has only 7.5% of its native vegetation as fully protected areas. Given this, in 2016 the Brazilian government started an official project to monitoring deforestation in the biome, through the so-called PRODES-Cerrado, responsible for mapping deforested areas from 2000 on, and DETER-Cerrado, responsible to generate deforestation alerts. Seeking to contribute with both context information and confidence levels for the polygons produced by these two monitoring systems, we developed the Deforestation Polygon Assessment Tool. This web-based platform process and presents several analysis for PRODES-Cerrado and DETER-Cerrado polygons using automatic assessments (e.g. BFastMonitor and Weights of Evidence), field validation and spatial analysis with key datasets (e.g. National Land Registry, Land-Use and Land-Cover maps). The platform implements an interactive map which allows a fast and comprehensive visualization of different layers, as well as a Deforestation Report at the polygon level, which gathers all the information about each polygon, providing greater reliability and understanding of the deforestation dynamics in the Cerrado. Future improvements in the platform will consider additional, spatial relations in order to assist government agencies to either prevent or reduce deforestation occurrences in each municipality in the Cerrado biome.