Land use in a portion of the Dourados River watershed

This study aimed to identify conflicts between the current use of lands and agricultural potential through GIS techniques in a portion of the watershed of the Dourados river, in the State of Mato Grosso do Sul The current agricultural use map was obtained by a satellite equipped with Landsat 5 Thematic Mapper sensor. The extraction of information on satellite images to recognize patterns and homogeneous objects was made by means of a classifier multiespectral "pixel by pixel" maximum likelihood (GML), which used only the spectral information of each pixel individually to establish homogeneous regions. The classes were created: water, wetland, cane sugar, farming, forest, grassland and bare soil. The classification of the image given by the semi-automated method (supervised) with the classifier region Bhattacharya. To evaluate the "conflict" of land use in the chosen area performed the map overlay class of agricultural land suitability map of current land use classification derived from the image by means of GIS after Grouping of agricultural suitability land. In the studied portion of the Dourados river watershed there was a conflict between the current use of lands and agricultural potential of 22%, pastures containing the highest percentage of conflict, although these have occupied the total area smaller percentage than crops and cultivation of cane sugar.