TEMPORAL ANALYSIS OF LAND USE AND COVER IN THE HYDROGRAPHIC WATERSHED OF RIO PIRACICABA IN MINAS GERAIS

In the state of Minas Gerais, the Piracicaba River basin installed the largest steelfactory in Latin America. Analyzes indicate that in the last 30 years, a drop in the flow of the Piracicaba river in the basin's exuvial, despite the climatological normals showing increased precipitation. The decrease in flow may have been affect by changes in land use and cover. Thus, this work aims to identify changes in land cover between 1987 and 2018, in the Piracicaba River basin. For the land use map, images from Mapbiomas were use in the years 1987, 1997, 2007 and 2018. For the delineation of the watershed and selection of more sloping areas, a Digital Elevation Model was use. The results indicated that there is a substitution of native forest for planted forest, mainly between 2007 and 2018, and in the total period, it reaches 13% of the basin area. A similar behavior was observe in the slope intervals defined in the study, where areas with a slope greater than 47% represent only 5.2% of the basin area (28,239.7 hectares). Hydrological studies with eucalyptus area in relation to native forest areas are also recommend.