# Analysis of a Landscape Intensely Modified by Agriculture in the Tiete-Jacare Watershed, Brazil
###### Abstract
The ground measurements, digital image processing, and geoprocessing techniques used revealed that the area is predominantly used for agriculture. However, the authors also reported that several areas are degraded and deforested. Aiming to monitor land use and land cover, as well as other environmental applications, the European Space Agency (ESA) created in 2012 the Copernicus Program, an European system coordinated and managed by the European Commission for monitoring the Earth. In this context, the ESA has been currently developing a new family of missions called Sentinels, designed specifically to meet the Copernicus program's operational needs. Each Sentinel mission is based on two satellite constellations to fulfil the coverage requirements, providing robust datasets for Copernicus Services [19]. The Sentinel-2 mission captures optical images at a high spatial resolution (from 10 m to 60 m) over both land and coastal waters. Twin satellites, the Sentinel-2A and the Sentinel-2B, support a range of applications and services, such as Earth monitoring and observation applications [19]. In this setting, the watershed analysis approach is of fundamental importance for being the central unit of the landscape. Additionally, water management is more efficient when a watershed is considered. In this sense, policy initiatives and the monitoring of environmental resources are also feasible for managers and decision-makers, assuring biodiversity maintenance. Forest coverage is usually restricted to small and fragmented forest remnants where several species are still found. However, these endemic species are facing a high degree of environmental degradation. [PERSON] identified this issue in 1988 as biodiversity hotspots, whose regions have a more urgent need of conservation actions and the constant monitoring of anthropic impacts [8,20]. Particularly in Brazil, river basin committees were established to manage regional planning in several watersheds. They contribute to the environmental and socio-economic management plan of the watersheds and define sustainable water usage and policy rules. Interestingly, planning is predominantly done locally, that is, despite following both the state and federal legislation each municipality or county acts locally. Nonetheless, this organization is insufficient to solve and cover all the regional administrative obstacles in many cases, especially when the focus of the management is on the conservation and preservation of natural resources [21]. In the Tiete-Jacare Watershed, an intense modification and an increase in agricultural activities have been identified over the past 30 years, which occur without environmental planning. Therefore, further studies are still necessary to understand the impacts of anthropic activities on a watershed scale and how they modify the landscape structure [22; 23; 24]. This concept is also important when facing pressure from society and the financial sector that aims at sustainability over economic growth. In this context, it is highly essential to conduct studies on the most efficient methods to accelerate analyses that evidence the loss of natural areas and environmental quality in the Brazilian and international contexts. To handle the large amount of data from optical imagery, machine learning such as the random forest (RF) approach is suggested for environmental studies at the watershed scale [25; 26], as it is able to deal with many datasets [24; 25; 26]. This study aimed to analyse the land use and land cover changes in the Tiete-Jacare Watershed (Sao Paulo state, Brazil) using the RF algorithm and Sentinel-2 satellite data from 2016 to 2018 to detect landscape changes.