REMOTE SENSING APPLIED TO GRASSLAND ECOSYSTEMS IN REGIONS WITH CLIMATIC VULNERABILITY

The aim of this review is to present the concepts and current research on the use of remote sensing in studies of pastoral ecosystems. The management of pasture plays an important role in the balance between biomass production and its regrowth so that the determination of biomass production is fundamental information to perform the adjustment of the number of animals. There are direct and indirect methods to obtain forage biomass in pastures. Generally the most used are direct methods, where there is the cutting of all forage present in a known area frame, and this requires the help of a variety of tools, requiring infrastructure, labor with long-term fieldwork. Remote sensing is an indirect way to determine biomass in pastures, which has a significant potential to monitor vegetation dynamics, besides predicting events such as the beginning or peak of vegetation growth. One of the ways to monitor the vegetation is through the use of vegetation indexes. There are several vegetation indexes, but soil adjusted vegetation index (SAVI) and normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) are the most used in studies on pastoral ecosystems. Remote sensing used for pasture evaluation can contribute with relevant and complementary information on forage production, as well as the growth behavior of the forage plant, allowing to obtain information on large scales.