Ontology-Based Modeling of Land Change Trajectories in the Brazilian Amazon

Tropical deforestation is an example of geochange with massive impacts to the environment locally and globally. In the Brazilian Amazon deforestation has prevailed owing mostly to private investments in agricultural expansion, associated with large-scale cattle ranching, smallscale subsistence farming and soybeans expansion. Data on deforestation have been relied mostly on satellite remote sensing, mapping the extent of forest loss. Several existing data having diverse spatial and temporal resolution are maintained to analyze the whole land cover dynamics in the region. Although the extent of forest loss has been examined across the Brazilian Amazon, little is known about the transitions among land change pathways. Nevertheless, there is much information about site conditions available from different sources, such as land management and agricultural production, as well as existing settlements, land tenure and household assets. In this paper we propose the Process-oriented Land Use and Tenure Ontology (PLUTO) for semantically integrating and reasoning about data sets related to deforestation and land change trajectory in the Brazilian Amazon, and for publishing them as Linked Data.