Use of Rapideye images from the planet platform to update vegetation cover studies in Tenosique, Tabasco, Mexico.

Tenosique is a small town located on the border between Mexico and Guatemala, on the banks of the Usumacinta River. The area is considered a tropical climate with swampy and jungle areas. Previous studies had exposed the changes in vegetation cover related to the public policies applied at the site. Some examples of these policies are: the 1917 agrarian reform of land distribution to the peasants for cultivation, in 1938 concessions were made to national and foreign companies to exploit forest resources; in 1958 the agrarian reform for cultivation made the agricultural zone advance towards the jungle forest; in 1965 the food crisis promoted livestock; in 1976 it opted for the extraction of oil, and with the economic crisis in 1982 the financial support to the peasants and their ejidos is withdrawn, and finally in 2008 this area becomes a flora and fauna protection area. Past studies have been developed from a social and artistic point of view as well as quantifiable with the use of Landsat satellite images, covering large temporalities as well as a regional coverage scale, however, the results resolutions have made their interpretation difficult, reporting only the 20% plant loss over time. The objective of this project is to update the pre-existing study using high-resolution images, on a smaller surface. For this, 5-meter resolution Rapideye satellite images were downloaded from the Planet platform (Planet Application Program Interface: In Space for Life on Earth) with the help of an educational license obtained from an artistic quality project. The temporality of the images ranges from 2010 to 2020. The methodology includes corresponding atmospheric corrections, the supervised classification, and the coverage analysis obtained from the application of the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI).  Conclusions show the impact of the inputs resolution improvement in the study.