Paper on land use intensity trajectories on Amazonian pastures published by four of our lab members...
"We derived annual spectral variability metrics from the Landsat TM and ETM+ archive (1984-2012) to capture trajectories of woody vegetation cover on managed grasslands. Since the regional management practices were until recently widely limited to manual clearing and burning of pastures, the presence / absence of woody vegetation serves as a proxy for land use intensity. We performed a regional scale analysis of our land use intensity proxy, revealing the onset of an intensification processes simultaneously to the Brazilian government´s initial efforts in forest conservation in the late 1980s. Furthermore, changes in our intensity proxy align well with regional environmental policies (e.g. the revision of Brazil´s national forest code) and market dynamics (e.g. opening of the region for export trade)."
Open access to the article for 50 days (approx until 10th June 2015)