LUCC (Land Use and Cover Change) and the Environmental-Economic Accounts System in Brazil

Abstract: The objective of this work is to produce statistics that are going to show changes occurred in Brazil’s ecosystems and these statistics are going to join the SEEA (Environmental-Economic Accounts System). It is based by a SEEA’s methodology, diffused by UN (United Nations), which aims an approach between economic and environmental statistics, producing international comparability and conceptual uniformity to evaluate change process in land cover and land use that occurs in several countries. It is necessary to verifying the suitability of methodological procedures to Brazilian reality and the access to all information and files needed. The first step was analysing MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) as orbital instrument on the purposed classification method. The choice of this sensor was made because of the product’s quality and its capacity to generate images of a large area, though the challenge is to identify accurate Land usage’s categories in images with a spatial resolution of approximately 250 m. After the final classification, the next step is to make a quantification and comparison of data from these different years using a 1 km² grids, as proposed in an already used methodology by the European Environment Agency. This procedure will allow evaluate and identify the process of changing in each grid of the land cover and land use, and provide historical series of the chosen years.