Land-cover changes and drivers of palm swamp degradation in southeastern Brazil from 1984 to 2018

The impact of increasing human and climatic changes has caused the degradation of wetlands across the globe. Understanding the causes such process is important as wetlands provide a variety of ecosystem services. In the present study, we analyzed land cover patterns in palm swamps and their areas of influence in 1984, 1994 and 2018 in southeastern Brazil. We identified potential drivers of palm swamp degradation using data obtained by remote sensing. We also evaluated whether changes in the surrounding area were correlated with the degradation within the palm swamps. In addition, we correlated the variations on surface temperature with the different levels of degradation of the palm swamps. Our results indicate that the palm swamps in the study region underwent temporal changes in land cover patterns, with an increase in degraded area from 1984 to 2018. We observed that the size and average slope of the palm swamp and the density of surrounding roads affected the proportion of degraded area. We also demonstrated that the surface temperature is a good proxy for estimating the environmental quality of palm swamps. Our assessment indicates that palm swamp degradation is a complex process that result from intertwined environmental, social, economic and political factors.