The Brazilian livestock has been suffering pressure from national and international entities regarding the occupation of land with pasture. Thus, the government has created a program to map and monitor the advance of livestock in the state of Pará through geoprocessing and remote sensing techniques. The aim is to portray the occupation and monitor the increase of pasture areas annually, through satellite imagery, providing better orientation on audits performed by governmental agencies in the areas of pasture expansion. Mapping and monitoring have been done by the use of Landsat5 (TM) satellite images in 33 municipalities of the southeast of Pará state. The analysis consisted of image interpretation to determine polygons of pasture areas, using software for image processing and cartographic edition. It was found that 30.5% of the mapped area was occupied by livestock in 2011. The monitoring of 2011 showed an increase of 2.4% of deforestation compared to the year 2010. This result showed that satellite imagery mapping is a tool that supports the analysis of the Brazilian livestock scenario and monitoring is a tool that safely quantifies the areas that are being deforested for this activity. This paper contributes to the defining of policies to reduce deforestation such as an appropriate use of pastures and management of animals with effective techniques. The adoption of such policies result in the increase of beef cattle productivity and the decrease of environmental problems such as erosion and desertification,consequently avoiding the opening of new areas of pasture on forested areas.Pages: 7578-758
