Evaluation of Vegetation Indices at Livestock Integrated Systems using Remote Sensing Data

Livestock systems? economic importance and a growing demand for production efficiency of Brazilian pastures have been fostering researches about the performance of livestock systems under different types of management. Integrated crop-livestock-forestry systems aim at greater sustainability at the farm, and incorporate agricultural, livestock and/or forestry components within the same area under crop rotation, double cropping or sequential cropping (BALBINO et al., 2011). Thus, in this study we evaluated the effect of different livestock production systems on the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI). On one side, the greenness represented by NDVI values correlates with plant production to indicate stronger or weaker production, and also to act as an indicator to distinguish the types of management of livestock systems (ALVARENGA et al., 2015). On the other side, biomass production in pastures correlates with potential for carbon storage in the soil (OLIVEIRA, 2015)