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Land use changes after the period commodities rising price in the Rio Grande do Sul State, Brazil

2017; UNIVERSIDADE FEDERAL DE SANTA MARIA; Volume: 47; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1590/0103-8478cr20160647

1678-4596

Vicente Celestino Pires Silveira, José A. González, Eliana Lima da Fonseca,

Conservation, Biodiversity, and Resource Management

ABSTRACT: At the end of the 20th and early 21st century, agricultural systems incorporated definitively a new mission: to generate goods for a world population that continues to grow and whose way of life demand food with low environmental impact. Soybean is the main raw material for the production of biodiesel in Brazil, accountably responsible for 82.4% of the total produced between 2006 and 2013. The Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul (RS), which is formed by the Pampa and the Atlantic forest biomes, was responsible for 35.7% of the country's biodiesel production in the referred period. The aim of this paper was to verify the impact of the increased area of soybean cultivation in land use in Rio Grande do Sul State, in the period between 1990 and 2015, considering separately its two biomes (Pampa and Atlantic Forest) original areas, using both census dataset and satellite images. We used the period from 1990 to 2000 as before commodity rising price (BCRP) and the period from 2000 to 2013 as commodity rising price (CRP). The 505,162 ha from Atlantic Forest biome and 1,192,115ha from Pampa biome were added to soybean production in the CRP period. In the Atlantic Forest, this enlargement occurred in the border of the main production area, while in Pampa biome conversion of natural grassland to crop land was the main reason for the large increment in the cultivated area.