Avaliação das temperaturas de superfície e do ar a partir da intensificação do agronegócio no território quilombola de Morro de São João, Tocantins

Abstract

The present research studies environmental changes due to the advance of Agricultural Business in the Quilombola Community Morro de São João (CQMSJ), in the State of Tocantins, and its repercussions on the surface and air temperatures. In the last 20 years, the community notices the consequences of environmental changes as large-scale profit crops fitting the agribusiness model replaces native vegetation, which was part of its authentic territory. Because of its interdisciplinary aspect, the methodology associates climatology and geographical information system to analyze climate issues. Regarding climatology, the collected data about air temperature comes from Laboratório de Análises Geoambientais (LGA/UFT) database, gathered with a mobile transect between the years 2019/2020 on the studied site, and from field data collection at fixed points on the data logger in episodes at the end of each season between the years 2020 and 2021. Composing NDVI (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index) and TST (Land Surface Temperature) maps by satellite images captured from the Landsat 5, 7, and 8 series. The maps refer to periods of the dry season (winter/fall) and a rainy season (spring/summer), in case scenarios referring to two distinct seasons back in (1999/2000) and then (2019/2020/2021), before and after agriculture expansion in the studied area. Results indicate variation in the surface temperature is mostly associated with changes and modifications in land use and occupation over the CQMSJ territory. Over the years, the TST changes were more expressive in places with more intense anthropic activities, such as in the restricted monoculture area in the west (near TO-458) and east of the study area (to the right of the São Felipe stream).Referring to air temperature, the spatial variations on the transect indicate that temperature differences between the points are not as high as those typically measured in studies of urban climate (heat islands), but suggest that the environmental changes lead to the formation of microclimatic mosaics can increase over time. The temporal performance of temperature differences observed in a simultaneous analysis at fixed points, the pattern is very to the documented in studies of urban climate i.e. some types of weather, with variances, in each season of the year can increase or mitigate temperature differences. Results point to the possible consequences of intensive exploration of this traditional territory located in the Cerrado biome, especially when comes to its microclimatic aspects with possible effects on the life of a quilombola community.