COMBINING SENSORS IN LANDSCAPE ECOLOGY: IMAGERY-BASED AND FARM-LEVEL ANALYSIS IN THE STUDY OF HUMAN-DRIVEN FOREST FRAGMENTATION / Combinando sensores em geoecologia: sensoriamento remoto e análise sócio-econômica de propriedades rurais no estudo da fragmentação florestal antrópica

Abstract

Although remote sensed methods provide reliable basis for identifying the amount and spatialconfiguration of deforestation, they cannot solely explain its underlying causes. For that, weneed to complement the imagery analysis with socio-economic data from household or farmlevelstudies, because these domestic units affect process such migration, land-use, andtechnology choice. Thus, by combining remote imagery sensor and social survey, we obtain a merged analytical framework, which has the potential to improve our understanding on thedeterminants of human-driven forest fragmentation. We present such a methodologicalframework for studying deforestation in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest. Two empirical studies— a remote sensing analysis and a farm-level survey — were put together in the context of awider project focusing on forest fragmentation process in the northeastern Guanabara region,Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. We show that, rather than ‘patchwork quilt’ methodologies, we needtheoretical-oriented frameworks that give sense to the use of different landscape ecologicalapproaches and methods (imagery analysis, mathematical modeling and social studies) in orderto document and interpret land-use changes.

Keywords

• remote sensing
• farm-level survey
• landscape research methodology
• forest