Abstract
Floodplains in the Amazon are areas of great economic, social and ecological importance. Occupation in these areas brings various impacts due to its complexity and fragility. This paper aims to analyze dynamics of change in land use and land cover in the floodplain of Lago Grande do Curuai, near Santarém city, in the state of Pará. To that end, geotechnologies associated with landscape metrics and an analysis of two different geographic clippings of the region were used. The first geographic clipping covers the entire hydrographic basin, focusing on the analysis of the natural vegetation cover (dryland and lowlands); the second geographic clipping shows the area divided in six landscape zones, whose criteria are the productive systems and the characteristics of use of the region. We classified images from satellites Landsat 5 and 7 from the years 1985, 1997 and 2014. Landscape metrics established patterns that facilitated the comparison between different times. In the first geographic clipping, metrics show a moderate dynamic in the period. Although there is a decrease in dry land forest areas, the class in which there is greater increase is the secondary/"capoeira" vegetation. There are increases in the pasture areas, the farmlands, however, remain stable; pasture and farming areas occur in a dispersed way in the territory and in small allotments; this dynamic revealed by classification indicates that cultivation areas are occupied by rotation, being occupied and abandoned over time. In the second geographic clipping, zones 3 and 4 concentrate most of the processes ofreplacing the natural vegetation cover by anthropic activities. The analysis in different geographic clippings shows the researched area has heterogeneous patterns of occupation in time and space.