ESTUDO DA EVOLUÇÃO ESPAÇO-TEMPORAL DA COBERTURA VEGETAL DO MUNICÍPIO DE BOA VISTA-PB, UTILIZANDO GEOPROCESSAMENTO

Abstract

The study area involves the territory limit of the Boa Vista municipality, 446.30 km2, situated in the Cariris Velhos homogeneous micro region, semi-arid region of the Paraiba State. The present work had as objective the elaboration of thematic maps of the space-time evolution of vegetal covering classes, period 1987/2004, of the Boa Vista municipality using TM/LANDSAT-5 satellite's digital images and photo interpretation techniques and images digital processing, available in the SPRING v. 4.2 software, beyond field work. The maps were elaboration be using the segment images supervised classification method and edited by SCARTA module. The results had indicated that the covering vegetal class most conserving, dense to semi dense, suffered reduction of 13.93% between 1987 and 2004; in this period the percent of areas with semi-dense to semi-sparse class was practically steady, diminishing only 0.87%; besides, the more critical covering class (semi-sparse to sparse and sparse + exposed soil) had increased 9.02% and 5.73%, respectively. These results are related with the raised use of lands for cattle the extensive one, as well as for the lack of income of the agricultural population that without option uses the vegetation in the firewood form.