BRAZILIAN AMAZONIA DEFORESTATION DETECTION USING SPATIO-TEMPORAL SCAN STATISTICS

Abstract. The spatio-temporal models, developed for analyses of diseases, can also be used for others fields of study, including concerns about forest and deforestation. The aim of this paper is to quantitatively check priority areas in order to combat deforestation on the Amazon forest, using the space-time scan statistic. The study area location is at the south of the Amazonas State and cover around 297.183 kilometre squares, including the municipality of Boca do Acre, Labrea, Canutama, Humaita, Manicore, Novo Aripuana e Apui County on the north region of Brazil. This area has showed a significant change for land cover, which has increased the number of deforestation's alerts. Therefore this situation becomes a concern and gets more investigation, trying to stop factors that increase the number of cases in the area. The methodology includes the location and year that deforestation’s alert occurred. These deforestation's alerts are mapped by the DETER (Detection System of Deforestation in Real Time in Amazonia), which is carry out by the Brazilian Space Agency (INPE). The software SatScanTM v7.0 was used in order to define space-time permutation scan statistic for detection of deforestation cases. The outcome of this experiment shows an efficient model to detect space-time clusters of deforestation’s alerts. The model was efficient to detect the location, the size, the order and characteristics about activities at the end of the experiments. Two clusters were considered actives and kept actives up to the end of the study. These clusters are located in Canutama and Lábrea County. This quantitative spatial modelling of deforestation warnings allowed: firstly, identifying actives clustering of deforestation, in which the environment government official are able to concentrate their actions; secondly, identifying historic clustering of deforestation, in which the environment government official are able to monitoring in order to avoid them to became actives again; and finally, verify that distances between the deforestation warning and the roads explain part of the significant clustering.