REFLEXOS DAS MUDANÇAS GLOBAIS SOBRE A DINÂMICA DA COBERTURA ESPACIAL DOS CAMPOS DE ALTITUDE NO INTERIOR DA AMÉRICA DO SUL

Abstract

Tropical mountain ecosystems are considered vulnerable to climate change due to the large percentage of endemic flora with limited distributions that are sometimes restricted to a single mountain range. Plant species restricted to certain altitudinal distribution ranges must have narrow habitat tolerances to those ranges in the elevation profile. Despite the importance of mountain ecosystems around the world, few studies have examined the mechanisms involved in land use/land cover changes in mountainous vegetation in South America, and to date no study has been carried out in the Campos de Altitude present in the Pantanal sul-mato-grossense. The objective of this research was to carry out monitoring via remote sensing on the spatial dynamics of the mountainous vegetation Campos de Altitude in Serra do Amolar and Morraria do Urucum inserted in the Pantanal sul-mato-grossense. First, a historical/bibliometric survey was carried out to present historical data from the areas of study and also to see studies that had already been carried out within the same theme of this research. In the survey, Google Scholar, SciElo, Science Direct, Mendeley and Scopus were used to search for material, using keywords. After this survey, a geoprocessing technique was performed to quantify the space-time variation of the vegetation present in these two areas of analysis between the years 1985 and 2020 and then another separate analysis considering the time window between 1973 and 2022. This technique was through the use of Landsat-8, 5 and MSS (1-3) images. The NDVI was applied to measure the Campos de Altitude vegetation areas, separating them from the forested areas to determine whether there was a difference in the spatial distribution of these vegetations over these years. Finally, a climatological analysis was carried out where data on temperature, precipitation, evapotranspiration and NDVI were analyzed over the years 1982 to 2022 for climate data and from 1985 to 2022 for the NDVI since Landsat-5 and Landsat-8 were used, seeking to understand the relationships between climatic factors and the spatial alteration of Campos de Altitude. The results of the bibliometric analysis indicated that there were very few works related to this research, and no work developed in Brazil was found until the time of analysis (2020). The multitemporal NDVI analyzes to monitor the spatialization of the Campos de Altitude indicated that there were significant changes in the spatial distribution of the Campos de Altitude, where in turn there was an increase in forest vegetation and a decrease in the Campos de Altitude in all the studied year windows (1985 -2020 and 1973-2022). The climatological analyzes showed that there was an increasing trend in the studied variables, and that there was a relationship between the climatic variables and the NDVI. The study revealed the merit of this analysis with a technical approach to evaluate the contribution of climate change versus alteration in vegetation dynamics in mountain ecosystems and also demonstrated the spatial alteration of Campos de Altitude by environmental factors, even with a possible trend of a new process alteration of the mountainous ecosystem in the Pantanal Sul-mato-grossense by water regime factor in the last 15 years, which could lead to desertification