This paper describes the identification and quantification of land use changes in the Córrego do Bezerro Vermelho basin, Tangará da Serra, MT, using Landsat images from 1984 and 2011. Images were geo-referenced, classified, and processed by Spring software, and thematic classes were edited and quantified using ArcGis software. The Anthropic Transformation Index was applied to determine the degree of anthropization of the creek. Five classes were identified: forest cover, secondary vegetation, agriculture, pasture, and water bodies. The results indicated a decrease in the class percentiles: 35.35% of forest cover; 11,78% of pastures; and 100% of secondary vegetation, all related to a 248.75% increase in agriculture. The findings of this study indicated that the landscape was drastically altered due to an increase in the Anthropic Transformation Index from 4,75 to 5.88 between 1984 and 2011. Thus, the creek, which that was classified as a regular class in 1984, passed to a degraded class in 2011, due to anthropogenic activities associated with agricultural expansion.
Deforestation; Environmental conservation; Geotechnology
