Temporal series of EVI/MODIS to identify land converted to sugarcane

Time series of remote sensing EVI/MODIS data are an important source of information to evaluate the direct land conversion to sugarcane in response to increased ethanol production in Brazil. The present work uses a time series of EVI/MODIS data to identify the land use prior to the conversion to sugarcane in a dense cultivated region in Paraná State, Brazil. Some sugarcane fields were selected over MODIS images acquired during the period of 2000 to 2008 in order to obtain reference time series to perform the land use classification prior to 2005. Using the temporal behavior of the EVI curves it was possible to distinguish among pasture land, annual crops and sugarcane in order to identify the land use prior to sugarcane conversion. It was noticed that in 2000 several of the annual crop fields in 2005, were pasture land in 2000 which were gradually converted to annual crops until 2005 and then to sugarcane.