Analysis of temporal variation of Vegetation Index by Normalized Difference in the National Park of Serra do Gandarela in Minas Gerais using Landsat 8 images

Abstract

The difficulty of monitoring and inspecting the effectiveness of the actions of the Conservation Units management plan is a challenge due to the extensive territories they represent. This problem can be minimized with the use of geotechnologies such as remote sensing that allows to know the dynamics of the surface remotely. Thus, this work aimed to analyze the temporal dynamics of the vegetation of the Serra do Gandarela National Park and its surroundings between the years 2014 and 2019, through the use of the vegetation index NDVI, with images from the Landsat 8 satellite. ArcGis software version 10.5 and QGIS 2.18.0 were used for image treatment and NDVI calculation and classification. When analyzing the results produced, an increase in vegetation density was observed in the study area after the creation of the park, dense vegetation regions increased their areas by 5.5% and areas with some type of anthropic action or exposed soil obtained an area loss of 1.4%. It was possible to verify that the creation of the park contributed to the conservation of the natural resources of the study region and that the geoprocessing tools are effective in the process of monitoring vegetation dynamics.