The Map of Land Use and Cover of the State of Rondônia revealed that 37% of its territory are occupied by special areaswithout any external anthropic intervention: Indian Lands, Conservation Units for Integral Protection and Conservation Units for Sustainable Use Despite this, it is worth highlighting that 2.4% of these areas are used for farming, livestock and, above all, for logging.

The map pointed out the expansion of livestock across old areas of permanent farming like cacao. It also pointed out the consolidation of soybeans and corn farming across the flatlands in the south of Rondônia, unveiling the predominance of agricultural activities in the state. Represented by farming and livestock, either alone or together, the agricultural areas occupied 40% of the whole state. Forestry was practiced in 22% of the territory, highlighted by the exploitation of rubber trees, Brazil nuts and copaiba oil.

The Map of Land Use and Cover of the State of Rondônia is available in pdf and shape formats in the following links:

ftp://geoftp.ibge.gov.br/mapas_tematicos/uso_da_terra/unidades_federacao/

ftp://geoftp.ibge.gov.br/mapas_tematicos/uso_da_terra/unidades_federacao/shape/RO/

The map will be soon available for consultation at the INDE website - National Spatial Data Infrastructure: www.visualizador.inde.gov.br.

The map was produced by the Land Use team of the Division of Natural Resources and Environmental Studies, of the Directorate of Geosciences of IBGE, through the interpretation of LANDSAT 5 - TM images of 2011. To accomplish this task, IBGE used the System of Classification of Land Use (SCUT), a system developed in-house. SCUT allows the representation of reality by means of satellite images, its first source of information, complemented by fieldworks, interviews, statistical data and any available literature.

SCUT is a hierarchical and multi-level system, providing five large cover classes at the first level: Non-agricultural Anthropic Areas, Agricultural Anthropic Areas, Areas of Natural Vegetation, Water and Other Areas. These categories are unfolded into 12 subclasses at the second level. At the third level, numerous possibilities of associations of land use are combined by means of queries to the system, allowing the combination of up to three associations in each unit.

As a result of the diversity of uses within each mapping unit, the areas were mapped as homogeneous units, i.e., with cover and land use patterns consistent with the 1:1,000,000 scale of representation of the associations of use of the identified phenomena.