Alexandre Coutinho - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Alexandre Coutinho

Environmental Research Letters

This study examines how land tenure constrains Brazil’s ability to meet its deforestation control... more This study examines how land tenure constrains Brazil’s ability to meet its deforestation control and forest restoration goals in its Amazonia biome. Our findings are based on an updated assessment of land tenure and land use in the region. Between 2019 and 2021, 44% of deforestation in Amazonia occurred in private lands, while forest removal in settlements ranged from 31% to 27% of the total. Deforestation in undesignated public lands increased from 11% in 2008 to 18% in 2021. Deforestation is highly concentrated, with 1% of properties accounting for 82.5% of forest cuts in 2021. In Amazonia, there is considerable non-compliance with the legal reserve provisions set by Brazil’s Forest Code. Legal reserve deficits in private lands sum up to 18.17 Mha (million hectares), compared with 12.49 Mha of legal reserve surpluses. Even if all forest surpluses are offered in the forest credits market set in the Forest Code, farmers still need to restore 5.67 Mha to comply with the law. Large-s...

In its Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Cli... more In its Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, Brazil committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions and restoring its forests. This study examines the challenges of fulfilling these commitments in Brazilian Amazonia. We carry out a detailed assessment of the current status of land tenure in the region and its relation to deforestation. After dealing with conflicts and overlaps between data from various sources, we produce a new map of public and private land tenure in Amazonia. Combining this map with Brazil's official data on deforestation, we find out how much natural vegetation has been preserved in each public or private area. The result is used to estimate how much deforestation is illegal. We also establish how much deforestation is associated with each land tenure type. Our results show that most deforestation inside rural properties is done by a few landowners, a finding that has important consequences for l...

Revista Brasileira de Cartografia

The Brazilian Cerrado is one of the worldÂ´s biodiversity hotspot and hosts some of the most inte... more The Brazilian Cerrado is one of the worldÂ´s biodiversity hotspot and hosts some of the most intensive agricultural activities for food production in the world. The objective of this study was to produce a land-use and land-cover (LULC) map of the Cerrado based on Landsat-8 Operational Land Imager (OLI) images. A set of 121 scenes from 2013 was processed using the image segmentation technique. The segments were exported in the shapeï¬ le format and interpreted visually in a geographical information system software using RGB/564 color composites. The following LULC classes were considered: annual croplands, perennial croplands, cultivated pasturelands, reforestation, mosaic of occupation, urban areas, mining areas, bare soil, forestlands, non-forestlands, water bodies, and non-identiï¬ ed (clouds and burned areas). The overall accuracy was estimated by an independent scientist with large experience in CerradoÂ´s image interpretation. The results showed that 43.4% of the study area ...

Esta colectânea de textos resultou da conferência internacional «Empresários e Empreendedorismo e... more Esta colectânea de textos resultou da conferência internacional «Empresários e Empreendedorismo em África: experiências, reflexões e perspectivas», organizada pelo Centro de Estudos Africanos do ISCTE. Como tal, inclui textos de investigadores e apresentações feitas por empresários nesta reunião. Para além de serem abordados assuntos diversos respeitantes ao tema - desenvolvimento, economia informal, crédito, gestão ou novas tecnologias -, inclui ainda um conjunto de textos resultantes de pesquisas realizadas noutros contextos empresariais - como a China ou o Brasil. Entre as análises respeitantes ao continente africano, apresentam-se estudos realizados num número diversificado e amplo de países, para além de Angola e Moçambique, países sobre os quais se centra o projecto de investigação que motivou esta conferência

Meritum, Revista de Direito da Universidade FUMEC, Nov 24, 2015

Resumo: Neste texto, reflete-se sobre os instrumentos concebidos para o desenvolvimento sustentáv... more Resumo: Neste texto, reflete-se sobre os instrumentos concebidos para o desenvolvimento sustentável, os quais foram uma resposta à crise ambiental decorrente do desenvolvimento econômico. Contudo, tais instrumentos se mostram insuficientes. Nesse trilhar, a adoção do princípio da responsabilidade de Hans Jonas serve de fundamento ético para o agir moral do homem diante do atual modelo econômico e da crise ambiental. Palavras-chave: Desenvolvimento sustentável. Crise ambiental. Princípio da responsabilidade.

This dataset contains the yearly maps of land use and land cover classification for Amazon biome,... more This dataset contains the yearly maps of land use and land cover classification for Amazon biome, Brazil, from 2000 to 2019 at 250 meters of spatial resolution. We used image time series from MOD13Q1 product from MODIS (collection 6), with four bands (NDVI, EVI, near-infrared, and mid-infrared) as data input. A deep learning classification MLP network consisting of 4 hidden layers with 512 units was trained using a set of 33,052 time series of 12 known classes from both natural and anthropic land covers.Quality assessment using 5-fold cross-validation of the training samples indicates an overall accuracy of 99.22% and the following user's and producer's accuracy for the land cover classes: ProdAcc UserAccForest 99.80% 99.86%Pasture 98.72% 98.04%Soy_Corn 98.92% 99.06%Soy_Cotton 99.23% 99.25%Fallow_Cotton 95.74% 96.43%Millet_Cotton 100.00% 97.98%Soy_Fallow 99.76% 99.09%Savanna2 99.94% 99.47%Savanna1 98.18% 99.06%Wetlands 99.31% 98.19%Soy_Millet 76.67% 84.66%Soy_Sunflower 84.62...

2017 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (IGARSS), 2017

Multi-temporal and multi-sensor solutions are essential to increase timeliness and reliability of... more Multi-temporal and multi-sensor solutions are essential to increase timeliness and reliability of land monitoring systems. This paper advocates the exploitation of the temporal contextual information provided by temporally dense SAR and optical data series series through the use of a Hidden Markov model (HMM)-based approach. An efficient strategy to incorporate the C-Band SAR data into the HMM framework, relying so far on Landsat, will be debated and assessed over a dynamic agricultural scenario, i.e. characterized by high temporal and spatial diversity in cropping practices. The site is located in the state of São Paulo (Brazil), where recent ground surveying activities has been conducted.

Brazilian Journal of Veterinary Research and Animal Science, 2008

Com o objetivo de avaliar o potencial da polpa citrica (PC) em provocar acidose lactica ruminal a... more Com o objetivo de avaliar o potencial da polpa citrica (PC) em provocar acidose lactica ruminal aguda (ALRA), 15 bovinos com peso medio de 160 kg providos de cânula ruminal nao-adaptados a dieta contendo concentrado foram alocados aleatoriamente em tres grupos: CONTROLE animais receberam apenas a dieta basal; SACAROSE animais receberam sacarose diretamente no rumem a fim de provocar ALRA; POLPA - grupo que recebeu subitamente alta quantidade de PC no rumen (equivalente a 1,65% do peso corporal). Em varios tempos no decorrer de 24 horas, apos administracao dos substratos, foram determinados o volume globular, pH, excesso de bases (BE) e lactato total no sangue e pH e concentracao de acido lactico total no conteudo ruminal. Exame clinico foi realizado no decorrer do 1o dia e o consumo de alimento acompanhado nos proximos sete dias. A administracao de sacarose provocou um caracteristico quadro de ALRA com o desenvolvimento de acidose ruminal e sistemica, apatia, desidratacao, diarreia ...

This paper presents the preliminary results of a methodology developed for the systematic mapping... more This paper presents the preliminary results of a methodology developed for the systematic mapping of annual crops, potentially applicable to the entire country. There are many interests and demands for information referring to agricultural activity worldwide. The execution of yearly crop harvests and its relation to the definition of future markets, the measurement of environmental impacts and, the formulation of public policies for agribusiness, are only some examples of the activities which would benefit from the data generation of cultures in the field. Mapping and monitoring the potential of daily images and of vegetation index from MODIS sensor system, in spite of its limitations due to the spatial resolution of 250m, has not yet been fully explored. The objective of this work is to develop and test a methodological approach based on the spectral/ temporal characteristics of an annual series of images from this sensor and to identify and map annual crops in the State Mato Gross...

These data sets include yearly maps of land cover classification for the state of Mato Grosso, Br... more These data sets include yearly maps of land cover classification for the state of Mato Grosso, Brazil, from 2001 (2000-09-01 to 2001-08-31) to 2017 (2016-09-01 to 2017-08-31), based on MODIS image time series (collection 6) at 250-meter spatial resolution (product MOD13Q1). Ground samples consisting of 1,892 time series with known labels are used as training data for a support vector machine classifier. We used the radial basis function kernel, with cost C=1 and gamma = 0.01086957. The classes include natural and human-transformed land areas, discriminating among different agricultural crops in state of land cover change maps for Mato Grosso State in Brazil. The results provide spatially explicit estimates of productivity increases in agriculture as well as the trade-offs between crop and pasture expansion. --- The correlation coefficients between the agricultural areas classified by our method and the estimates by IBGE (Brazil's Census Bureau) for the harvests from 2001 to 2017, were equal to 0.98. At the state level the soybean, cotton, corn and sunflower areas had a correlation equal 0.97, 0.85, 0.98 and 0.80. --- The areas classified as forest were compared with the Hansen et al. (2013, doi:10.1126/science.1244693) mapping for the year 2000. In order to separate the forest areas, we examined the areas with more than 25% tree cover on the Hansen et al. (2013, doi:10.1126/science.1244693) map. We found that 98% of the pixels classified as forest match the pixels indicated by Hansen et al. (2013) as having more than 25% tree cover. When we joined the cerrado and forest classes, 83% of the pixels match the pixels by Hansen et al. (2013) as having more than 25% tree cover. --- The pixels labeled as pasture were compared to the pasture mapping done by Parente et al. (2017, doi:10.1016/j.jag.2017.06.003). We found that 80% of the pixels classified as forest match the pixels indicated by Parente et al. (2017, doi:10.1016/j.jag.2017.06.003) for the state of Mato Grosso. --- In the land cover change maps for Mato Gross [...]

This data set includes yearly maps of land cover classification for the state of Mato Grosso, Bra... more This data set includes yearly maps of land cover classification for the state of Mato Grosso, Brasil, from 2001 to 2017, based on MODIS image time series (collection 6) at 250 meter spatial resolution (product MOD13Q1).Ground samples consisting of 1,892 time series with known labels are used as training data for a support vector machine classifier. We used the radial basis function kernel, with cost C=1 and gamma = 0.01086957. The classes include natural and human-transformed land areas, discriminating among different agricultural crops in state of Land cover change maps for Mato Grosso State in BrazilMato Grosso, Brazil's agricultural frontier. The results provide spatially explicit estimates of productivity increases in agriculture as well as the trade-offs between crop and pasture expansion.Quality assessment using a 5-fold cross-validation of the training samples indicates an overall accuracy of 96% and the following user's and producer's accuracy for the land cover classes:Cerrado: UA - 98% PA - 99%Fallow_Cotton UA - 96% PA - 93%Forest UA - 99% PA - 98%Pasture UA - 97% PA - 98%Soy-Corn UA- 91% PA - 93%Soy-Cotton UA - 97% PA - 97%Soy-Fallow UA - 98% PA - 98%Soy-Millet UA- 90% PA - 89%Soy-Sunflower UA - 77% PA - 65%---The correlation coefficients between the agricultural areas classified by our method and the estimates by IBGE (Brazil's Census Bureau) for the harvests from 2001 to 2017, were equal to 0.98. At state level the soybean, cotton, corn and sunflower areas had a correlation equal 0.97, 0.85, 0.98 and 0.80.The areas classified as forest were compared with the Hansen et al. (2013) mapping for the year 2000. In order to separate the forest areas, we examined the areas with more than 25% tree cover on the Hansen et al. (2013, doi:10.1126/science.1244693) map. We found that 99% of the pixels classified as forest match the pixels indicated by Hansen et al. (2013) as having more than 25% tree cover. When we joined the cerrado and forest classes, 84% of the pixels match the pixels by Hansen et al. (2013, doi [...]

Remote Sensing, 2020

Fast and accurate quantification of the available pasture biomass is essential to support grazing... more Fast and accurate quantification of the available pasture biomass is essential to support grazing management decisions in intensively managed fields. The increasing temporal and spatial resolutions offered by the new generation of orbital platforms, such as Planet CubeSat satellites, have improved the capability of monitoring pasture biomass using remotely sensed data. Here, we assessed the feasibility of using spectral and textural information derived from PlanetScope imagery for estimating pasture aboveground biomass (AGB) and canopy height (CH) in intensively managed fields and the potential for enhanced accuracy by applying the extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) algorithm. Our results demonstrated that the texture measures enhanced AGB and CH estimations compared to the performance obtained using only spectral bands or vegetation indices. The best results were found by employing the XGBoost models based only on texture measures. These models achieved moderately high accuracy to...

Cadernos de Estudos Africanos, 2007

Pesquisa Agropecuária Brasileira, 2019

The objective of this work was to analyze land use dynamics in the Brazilian Cerrado region from ... more The objective of this work was to analyze land use dynamics in the Brazilian Cerrado region from 2002 to 2013. This analysis was based on the interpretation of Landsat satellite images carried out by the projects Projeto de Conservação e Utilização Sustentável da Diversidade Biológica Brasileira (Probio) and TerraClass Cerrado 2013, both coordinated by Ministério do Meio Ambiente. In 2002, 38.9% of the Cerrado was covered by some type of anthropic activity. In 2013, this percentage increased to 43.4%. One of the main highlights is the emergence of a new agricultural frontier in the northern region of the study area, known as Matopiba.

ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, 2018

This paper presents innovative methods for using satellite image time series to produce land use ... more This paper presents innovative methods for using satellite image time series to produce land use and land cover classification over large areas in Brazil from 2001 to 2016. We used Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) time series data to classify natural and human-transformed land areas in the state of Mato Grosso, Brazil's agricultural frontier. Our hypothesis is that building high-dimensional spaces using all values of the time series, coupled with advanced statistical learning methods, is a robust and efficient approach for land cover classification of large data sets. We used the full depth of satellite image time series to create large dimensional spaces for statistical classification. The data consist of MODIS MOD13Q1 time series with 23 samples per year per pixel, and 4 bands (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), Enhanced Vegetation Index (EVI), near-infrared (nir) and mid-infrared (mir)). By taking a series of labelled time series, we fed a 92dimensional attribute space into a support vector machine model. Using a 5-fold cross validation, we obtained an overall accuracy of 94% for discriminating among nine land cover classes: forest, cerrado, pasture, soybeanfallow, fallow-cotton, soybean-cotton, soybean-corn, soybean-millet, and soybean-sunflower. Producer and user accuracies for all classes were close to or better than 90%. The results highlight important trends in agricultural intensification in Mato Grosso. Double crop systems are now the most common production system in the state, sparing land from agricultural production. Pasture expansion and intensification has been less studied than crop expansion, although it has a stronger impact on deforestation and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Our results point to a significant increase in the stocking rate in Mato Grosso and to the possible abandonment of pasture areas opened in the state's frontier. The detailed land cover maps contribute to an assessment of the interplay between production and protection in the Brazilian Amazon and Cerrado biomes. (Garnett, 2015). In the coming decades, Brazil needs to equalize economic gains and sustainable agricultural practices. A way to achieve this aim consists of (1) promoting new agricultural practices to increase productivity and (2) implementing efficient command-and-control and market-oriented policies to control deforestation (Nepstad et al., 2014; Arvor et al., 2016). Brazil's government has acted to reduce deforestation and the resulting emissions. Combining rapid assessment of new forest cuts with strong law enforcement, Brazil cut tropical deforestation by 80% from

International Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Information Systems, 2017

This paper presents a new approach to deal with agricultural crop recognition using SVM (Support ... more This paper presents a new approach to deal with agricultural crop recognition using SVM (Support Vector Machine), applied to time series of NDVI images. The presented method can be divided into two steps. First, the Timesat software package is used to extract a set of crop features from the NDVI time series. These features serve as descriptors that characterize each NDVI vegetation curve, i.e., the period comprised between sowing and harvesting dates. Then, it is used an SVM to learn the patterns that define each type of crop, and create a crop model that allows classifying new series. The authors present a set of experiments that show the effectiveness of this technique. They evaluated their algorithm with a collection of more than 3000 time series from the Brazilian State of Mato Grosso spanning 4 years (2009-2013). Such time series were annotated in the field by specialists from Embrapa (Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation). This methodology is generic, and can be adapted...

PloS one, 2017

Previous research has established the usefulness of remotely sensed vegetation index (VI) data fr... more Previous research has established the usefulness of remotely sensed vegetation index (VI) data from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) to characterize the spatial dynamics of agriculture in the state of Mato Grosso (MT), Brazil. With these data it has become possible to track MT agriculture, which accounts for ~85% of Brazilian Amazon soy production, across periods of several years. Annual land cover (LC) maps support investigation of the spatiotemporal dynamics of agriculture as they relate to forest cover and governance and policy efforts to lower deforestation rates. We use a unique, spatially extensive 9-year (2005-2013) ground reference dataset to classify, with approximately 80% accuracy, MODIS VI data, merging the results with carefully processed annual forest and sugarcane coverages developed by Brazil's National Institute for Space Research to produce LC maps for MT for the 2001-2014 crop years. We apply the maps to an evaluation of forest and agr...

Arquivos brasileiros de cirurgia digestiva : ABCD = Brazilian archives of digestive surgery

Respiratory physiotherapy plays an important role preventing complications in bariatric surgery. ... more Respiratory physiotherapy plays an important role preventing complications in bariatric surgery. To assess the effects of out-patient physiotherapy during post-operative period through respiratory pressures and functional capacity in individuals submitted to bariatric surgery. A prospective longitudinal and controlled study was done in adults with body mass index (BMI) equal or greater than 40 kg/m², who have been submitted to bariatric surgery. They were divided into two groups: intervention-group, who performed out-patient physiotherapy twice a week, from thirty to sixty days after surgery; and the control-group, who only followed home instructions. Both groups were evaluated before surgery and sixty days after surgery through manovacuometry, six-minute walk test and the Borg Scale of perceived exertion. Twenty participants were included the intervention-group and twenty-three in the control-group. Both groups had significant and similar weight loss after surgery. The manovacuomet...