MONITORING LAND USE CHANGES AROUND THE INDIGENOUS LANDS OF THE XINGU BASIN IN MATO GROSSO, BRAZIL
Damien Arvor (1), Margareth Simões Penello Meirelles (2,3), Rafaela Vargas (4), Ladislau Araújo Skorupa (2), Elaine Cristina Cardoso Fidalgo(2), Vincent Dubreuil (1), Isabelle Herlin (5), Jean-Paul Berroir (5) (1) COSTEL UMR CNRS 6554 LETG - IFR 90 CAREN, Université Rennes 2 : damien.arvor@uhb.fr (2) Embrapa Solos/Embrapa Meio Ambiente (3) Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro - UERJ (4) IHEAL, Institut des Hautes Études de l’Amérique Latine, Université de Paris III, Sorbonne Nouvelle (5) Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique. 1. INTRODUCTION The State of Mato Grosso (906000 km²), located in the southern region of the Brazilian Amazon, is composed of three main biomas (rainforest, Savanna or “cerrado” and Pantanal), all considered for their biodiversity. However, Mato Grosso is suffering devastating land use changes. According to the INPE (Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais), 40% of the Amazonian deforestation during the 1992-2005 years took place in the State of Mato Grosso, i. e. 104,076 km². These land use changes have been partly explained by the expansion of pasture and mechanized agriculture, primarily based on soybean crops [1]. In order to limit the deforestation in Amazonia and the cerrado, the Federal government created reserved areas like national parks and indigenous lands (about 31.1% of the Brazilian Amazonia, i. e. 1,318,329 km², are actually protected while this rate is only 2.2% in the cerrado). These lands may be considered to be protected areas for environmental conservation or for the preservation of traditional (mainly indigenous) communities. The main issue regarding the administrative situation of such protected areas consists in understanding how societies affect and are affected by land use changes inside and outside such areas. First, we need to determine if it is more efficient to protect the native