Geospatial technologies were used in the present work in order to assist apple orchards management. A navigation GPS was used to obtain waypoints for 201 apple fields in Rio Verde farm, located in the municipality of Fraiburgo, Santa Catarina State. These waypoints were introduced in the Geographical Information System (GIS) to obtain a map with the geographic limits of apple fields. These fields were then associated to a data base with several information such as: variety, planting date, area etc. Landsat-7 ETM+ images acquired on January 07th. 2000 and August 05th 2001 were used to classify the land use in the remaining areas of the farm. The size of the apple fields varied from 0.14 ha to 5.32 ha. A comparison between the area estimated with the GPS and the area estimated based on the number of plants times the area of each plant per field presented a correlation coefficient of 0.97. The classes of land used were: water bodies, swamp, forest, forest regrowth and reforestation. According to the results the following conclusions could be drawn: a) the navigation GPS appears to be an appropriate tool to obtain the geographic limits of apple fields; b) the Landsat images were useful to identify several classes of land used in the farm; c) the GIS associated to a data base is an important management tool for several apple orchards activities.
apple; Geographic Information Systems; GIS; remote sensing
