Land Use and Land Cover Products for Agricultural Mapping Applications in Brazil: Challenges and Limitations

Land Use and Land Cover Products for Agricultural Mapping Applications in Brazil: Challenges and Limitations

Reliable remote sensing-based Land Use and Land Cover (LULC) information is crucial for assessing Earth’s surface activities. Brazil’s agricultural dynamics, including year-round cropping, multiple cropping, and regional climate variability, make LULC monitoring a highly challenging task. The countr...

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Main Authors: Priscilla Azevedo dos Santos, Marcos Adami, Michelle Cristina Araujo Picoli, Victor Hugo Rohden Prudente, Júlio César Dalla Mora Esquerdo, Gilberto Ribeiro de Queiroz, Cleverton Tiago Carneiro de Santana, Michel Eustáquio Dantas Chaves
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2025-07-01
Series:Remote Sensing
Subjects:
LULC change
cropland
thematic maps
mapping
remote sensing
Brazil
Online Access:https://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/17/13/2324
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Summary:Reliable remote sensing-based Land Use and Land Cover (LULC) information is crucial for assessing Earth’s surface activities. Brazil’s agricultural dynamics, including year-round cropping, multiple cropping, and regional climate variability, make LULC monitoring a highly challenging task. The country has thirteen remote sensing-based LULC products specifically tailored for this purpose. However, the differences and the results of these products have not yet been synthesized to provide coherent guidance in assessing their spatio-temporal agricultural dynamics and identifying promising approaches and issues that affect LULC analysis. This review represents the first comprehensive assessment of the advantages, challenges, and limitations, highlighting the main issues when dealing with contrasting LULC maps. These challenges include incompatibility, a lack of updates, non-systematic classification ontologies, and insufficient data to monitor Brazilian LULC information. The consequences include impacts on intercropping estimation, diminished representation or misrepresentation of croplands; temporal discontinuity; an insufficient number of classes for subannual cropping evaluation; and reduced compatibility, comparability, and spectral separability. The study provides insights into the use of these products as primary input data for remote sensing-based applications. Moreover, it provides prospects for enhancing existing mapping efforts or developing new national-level initiatives to represent the spatio-temporal variation of Brazilian agriculture.
ISSN:2072-4292

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