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Urban forests contribute to maintaining livability and increase the resilience of cities in the face of population growth and climate change. Information about the geographical distribution of individual trees is essential for the proper management of these systems. RGB high-resolution aerial images have emerged as a cheap and efficient source of data, although detecting and mapping single trees in an urban environment is a challenging task. Thus, we propose the evaluation of novel methods for single tree crown detection, as most of these methods have not been investigated in remote sensing applications. A total of 21 methods were investigated, including anchor-based (one and two-stage) and anchor-free state-of-the-art deep-learning methods. We used two orthoimages divided into 220 non-overlapping patches of 512 × 512 pixels with a ground sample distance (GSD) of 10 cm. The orthoimages were manually annotated, and 3382 single tree crowns were identified as the ground-truth. Our findings show that the anchor-free detectors achieved the best average performance with an AP50 of 0.686. We observed that the two-stage anchor-based and anchor-free methods showed better performance for this task, emphasizing the FSAF, Double Heads, CARAFE, ATSS, and FoveaBox models. RetinaNet, which is currently commonly applied in remote sensing, did not show satisfactory performance, and Faster R-CNN had lower results than the best methods but with no statistically significant difference. Our findings contribute to a better understanding of the performance of novel deep-learning methods in remote sensing applications and could be used as an indicator of the most suitable methods in such applications.

Integrating agricultural land uses is a suitable alternative for fostering economic development and improving food security. However, the effects of long-term integrated systems on soil erosion and water infiltration are still poorly understood. Here, we investigate the influence of different agricultural land uses on soil erosion and water infiltration in an Oxisol site located in the Brazilian Cerrado region. The experimental area consisted of continuous grazing under variable stocking rates with regular fertilization (CG-RF), continuous cropping under no-till (CC-NT) and no-till with 4-year subsoiling (CC-SS), rotation of one year cropping and three years livestock in the livestock phase (C1-L3), rotation of four years cropping and four years livestock in the cropping phase (CL-4C) and in the livestock phase (CL-4L), and integrated crop-livestock-forestry in the cropping phase (CLF-C) and in the livestock phase (CLF-L). To evaluate water infiltration and soil loss, we used a rainfall simulator with a constant rainfall intensity of 74.9 ± 3.6 mm h−1 in plots of 0.7 m2. We carried out 72 rainfall simulations comprising four repetitions in each treatment under vegetation and bare soil. Stable infiltration rate (SIR) ranged from 45.9 to 74.8 mm h−1 and 19.4 to 70.8 mm h−1 under vegetation covers and bare soil, respectively. Our findings indicated that SIR values under CLF-C were 60% greater than under CG-RF. We also found that soil loss rates under CLF-C were 50% smaller than under CG-RF. The crop–livestock rotation period that presented better results of SIR and soil loss was one year of cropping and three years of livestock (C1-L3). Overall, we noted that SIR and soil loss values under CLF-C are similar to the Cerrado native vegetation. Therefore, our study reveals the opportunity to increase agricultural production, improve food supply, and reduce soil erosion with adequate soil and agricultural management.

Fire in Brazilian Pantanal represents a serious threat to biodiversity. The Brazilian National Institute of Spatial Research (INPE) has a program named Queimadas, which estimated from January 2020 to October 2020, a burned area in Pantanal of approximately 40,606 km2. This program also provides daily data of active fire (fires spots) from a methodology that uses MODIS (Aqua and Terra) sensor data as reference satellites, which presents limitations mainly when dealing with small active fires. Remote sensing researches on active fire dynamics have contributed to wildfire comprehension, despite generally applying low spatial resolution data. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) associated with high- and medium-resolution remote sensing data may provide a complementary strategy to small active fire detection. We propose an approach based on object detection methods to map active fire in the Pantanal. In this approach, a post-processing strategy is adopted based on Non-Max Suppression (NMS) to reduce the number of highly overlapped detections. Extensive experiments were conducted, generating 150 models, as five-folds were considered. We generate a public dataset with 775-RGB image patches from the Wide Field Imager (WFI) sensor onboard the China Brazil Earth Resources Satellite (CBERS) 4A. The patches resulted from 49 images acquired from May to August 2020 and present a spatial and temporal resolutions of 55 m and five days, respectively. The proposed approach uses a point (active fire) to generate squared bounding boxes. Our findings indicate that accurate results were achieved, even considering recent images from 2021, showing the generalization capability of our models to complement other researches and wildfire databases such as the current program Queimadas in detecting active fire in this complex environment. The approach may be extended and evaluated in other environmental conditions worldwide where active fire detection is still a required information in fire fighting and rescue initiatives.