SUBDIVISION OF PANTANAL QUATERNARY WETLANDS: MODIS NDVI TIMESERIES IN THE INDIRECT DETECTION OF SEDIMENTS GRANULOMETRY

Abstract. The Pantanal is the world's largest wetland presenting a variety of ecological sub-regions. The region is characterized by seasonal floods followed by long droughts. At this period, some areas rapidly dry, while others remain soaked. The study hypothesis was based on the statement that this phenomenon cannot be totally explained by small relief variations but by the sediment granulometry: the pelitic sediments allow the soil to retain moisture longer, implying that the vegetation has greater possibilities of continuing photosynthetically active even during the drought. It was developed based on the spectral behaviour of MODIS products, validated by previous fieldwork. Using MODIS, we studied a large scale patterns in spatial and seasonal dynamics of the vegetation in different regions of Pantanal. So, two indirect parameters of the local physical environment – sediment granulometry and water availability – potentially can be estimated. We calculated the NDVI from MOD09GQ for rainy and dry seasons, generating triplets (NDVI/NIR and Red bands) that allowed to identify vegetation changes in those periods. The 16-days composites of NDVI (MOD13Q1) were used to generate a 5-year time-series for pixels associated with 161 locals sampled for granulometric analyses. The samples were taken in 10 different areas from the 20 geological and environmentally homologous areas delimited in this research. The clear tendency in the time-series confirms the working hypothesis, indicating that there is a high relationship between drought-related changes in vegetation extracted from NDVI and sediment texture, parameter that plays an important role in soil moisture, influencing the vegetation response to droughts.