REMOTE SENSING IMAGES FOR MONITORING THE SUGARCANE HARVEST

The agricultural practice of burning the sugarcane straw has the intention of facilitating the manual harvest. In Sao Paulo state this practice is subjected to a rigorous environmental legislation, due to the negative impact for the environment. It is anticipated that sugarcane burning should gradually be eliminated until 2017. The present work has the objective of evaluating the sugarcane area harvested with and without burning in the entire state of Sao Paulo. For that purpose, available images from TM sensor, on board of Landsat-5 satellite, were used. Images were acquired from April to December 2006, which corresponds to the sugarcane harvest period. These images were analyzed by using digital processing and visual interpretation techniques. The sugarcane area harvested without burning was estimated as 1,085,730 ha and corresponds to 34.7% of the total mechanized harvested area. This is according to the expectation of 30% established by the environmental legislation for the year of 2006. The temporal image sequence acquired between April and December allows us to identify the sugarcane areas harvested without burning and, therefore, distinguish them from the sugarcane areas harvested with burning.