Changes in soil use in the lands of the sugar refinery of Las Palmas, province of Chaco, during the years 1987 and 2001

Abstract

One of the most important sugar refineries of Argentina was established at the end of the 19th Century, in the Bermejo region, province of Chaco: Las Palmas del Chaco Austral S.A. During the 1990s it fell victim to the mayor privatization policies of the time, as a consequence of which it closed down and ultimately vanished, eliminating the main source of labor in the city. Current innovative trends in teledetection, digital cartography and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are useful and important ways to offer up-todate knowledge in order to carry out diagnoses, monitoring and applications on the management and researching of current resources in various places of our country. In this paper, we attempt to analyze the changes in the use of the soil on the land of the former sugar refinery since its closure, by means of satellite imaging from 1987 and 2001, and of geographic information systems (GIS). A multi-spectral and multi-temporal analysis of the images will allow to distinguish the kinds of soil coverage based on their spectral response.