DMSP/OLS night-time lights imagery and urban population estimates in the Brazilian Amazon

The Brazilian Amazon occupies 5 million km and comprehends the largest preserved and continuous tropical rain forest in the world: a forested area of approximately 4 million km. In the last decades, the region has experimented intense transformation processes both in the physical and human aspects. Deforestation studies estimated a rate of 25 400 km of forest conversion for 2001 to 2002 period (INPE 2003). At the same time, the Legal Amazon in 2000 official census totalled 21.1 million of inhabitants, contributing with 12.4% for the total of the Brazilian population, in contrast with the contribution of 5.8% in 1950 (SUDAM/PNUD 2001). The importance and the extension of the Amazon forest for the dynamic of climatic and biogeochemical processes makes the Amazon deforestation a frequent study subject, specially considering the carbon cycling, the global climatic and environmental changes (Potter et al. 2001, LBA 2003, Roberts et al. 2003, Durieux et al. 2003, Ballester et al. 2003), and the biodiversity conservation (Fearnside 2001). The human dimension and its aspects are partially neglected. Human density, as an example, is usually indicated as one of a series of variables to explain the deforestation process (Geist and Lambin 2001, Wood and Skole 1998).