Caracterização geográfica e dinâmica de uso da terra da Ibiapaba e seu entorno, Domínio Fitogeográfico da Caatinga.

Abstract

Dry forests are beyond the most threatened ecosystems, which includes the remarkable Caatinga. Inside Caatinga ecosystem the Ibiapaba region has been considered as priority to conservation and has facing land use changes in the past years due to urbanization, agriculture, and cattle raising. These changes has been intensified because of new enterprises as wind will farms. Thereby, fragmentation and habitat loss are among the most aggressive human impacts. Whereas Ibiapaba is an area with high priority to Caatinga conservation, this research aims describe a general physical and phytoecology characterization to Ibiapaba, map land uses differences, and measure the vegetation cover loss at phytoecological areas among 15 years. The land use and cover mapping were built from satellites images using supervised classification as a result from Random Forest method applied on Google Earth Engine platform. This methodology allowed build comparative maps for land use in the years 2005, 2007, 2011, 2014, 2017, and 2020 as well as extract tabular data. Therefore, despite the observed growth of anthropic areas Ibiapaba does not have marked changes as other parts of Caatinga. In addition, Ibiapaba has unique opportunity to build a protection project more effective to these ecosystems insert on Brazilian semiarid.