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Sugarcane ethanol has been produced in Brazil since the early 20th century, but production increased in the mid‐1970s aiming at substituting 20% of the gasoline. Despite an increase in the 2000s production has been stable since 2008. This paper presents a review of the main developments achieved and future challenges. The sector has had positive economic and environmental results through technological development, as a result of research and development by private companies and strong public support. Sugarcane yield has steadily increased and positively impacted production costs, primarily due to better agronomic practices and breeding programs. Owing to environmental and economic reasons, there are on‐going programs to phase out burning, with the gradual replacement of manual harvest with burning by unburnt mechanised harvest. Important agronomic impacts are expected, caused by the large amount of straw left on the soil surface, which also represents a significant bioenergy potential. The sugarcane industry in Brazil has taken advantage of the combined production of sugar and ethanol, and, recently, many mills have enlarged their revenues with surplus electricity. The current efforts for diversification aim at ethanol production through hydrolysis of sugarcane residues and the development of chemical routes. From an environmental point of view, impacts related to land use change are expected on greenhouse emissions, water resources, and biodiversity. Ethanol production is likely to expand in Brazil due to the potential size of the domestic market and to the opportunities for exporting, but this will occur in a context of different and new challenges. WIREs Energy Environ 2014, 3:70–92. doi: 10.1002/wene.87 This article is categorized under: Bioenergy > Economics and Policy Bioenergy > Systems and Infrastructure Bioenergy > Climate and Environment

Tropical forests regulate the global water and carbon cycles and also host most of the world’s biodiversity. Despite their importance, they are hard to survey due to their location, extent, and particularly, their cloud coverage. Clouds hinder the spatial and radiometric correction of satellite imagery and also diminishing the useful area on each image, making it difficult to monitor land change. For this reason, our purpose is to identify the cloud detection algorithm best suited for the Amazon rainforest on Sentinel–2 images. To achieve this, we tested four cloud detection algorithms on Sentinel–2 images spread in five areas of the Amazonia. Using more than eight thousand validation points, we compared four cloud detection methods: Fmask 4, MAJA, Sen2Cor, and s2cloudless. Our results point out that FMask 4 has the best overall accuracy on images of the Amazon region (90%), followed by Sen2Cor’s (79%), MAJA (69%), and S2cloudless (52%). We note the choice of method depends on the intended use. Since MAJA reduces the number of false positives by design, users that aim to improve the producer’s accuracy should consider its use.

Recent applications of Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager (L8/OLI) and Sentinel-2 MultiSpectral Instrument (S2/MSI) data for acquiring information about land use and land cover (LULC) provide a new perspective in remote sensing data analysis. Jointly, these sources permit researchers to improve operational classification and change detection, guiding better reasoning about landscape and intrinsic processes, as deforestation and agricultural expansion. However, the results of their applications have not yet been synthesized in order to provide coherent guidance on the effect of their applications in different classification processes, as well as to identify promising approaches and issues which affect classification performance. In this systematic review, we present trends, potentialities, challenges, actual gaps, and future possibilities for the use of L8/OLI and S2/MSI for LULC mapping and change detection. In particular, we highlight the possibility of using medium-resolution (Landsat-like, 10–30 m) time series and multispectral optical data provided by the harmonization between these sensors and data cube architectures for analysis-ready data that are permeated by publicizations, open data policies, and open science principles. We also reinforce the potential for exploring more spectral bands combinations, especially by using the three Red-edge and the two Near Infrared and Shortwave Infrared bands of S2/MSI, to calculate vegetation indices more sensitive to phenological variations that were less frequently applied for a long time, but have turned on since the S2/MSI mission. Summarizing peer-reviewed papers can guide the scientific community to the use of L8/OLI and S2/MSI data, which enable detailed knowledge on LULC mapping and change detection in different landscapes, especially in agricultural and natural vegetation scenarios.

RESUMOConsiderando que algumas investigações sobre o tema aquecimento global utilizam longas séries temporais de temperatura uma questão que deve ser levantada é relativa a influência de possíveis concentrações de fontes de calor urbano a que os postos meteorológicos possam estar submetidos. O primeiro passo para responder a essa questão é verificar se, em uma mesma região, ocorrem tendências concomitantes de elevação nos dados de temperatura em diversas localidades, possivelmente ligadas a fenômenos de escala global. Entretanto, se essa elevação tiver seu início em períodos bastante distintos entre as diversas localidades, o descarte de forçantes radioativas locais como principais responsáveis por esse aumento, dificilmente poderá ser realizado. O objetivo do trabalho foi detectar tendências de elevação nas séries anuais de temperatura mínima, bem como a data inicial dessas prováveis alterações, em seis localidades do Estado de São Paulo. A caracterização das séries foi realizada por meio da distribuição normal. O teste de Mann-Kendall não indicou tendências concomitantes nos dados anuais de temperatura mínima. Dessa forma, fatores de escala local parecem se sobrepor a fatores de escala global como principais forçantes radioativas causadoras do aumento médio dos valores da variável meteorológica sob investigação. Os resultados demonstram a necessidade de avaliar e/ou isolar fatores locais, como a urbanização, antes que investigações sobre os temas aquecimento global e zoneamento agrícola sejam realizadas com base em séries históricas no Estado de São Paulo. Palavras-chave:Mann-Kendall, urbanização, ilha de calor. ABSTRACT STATISTICAL ANALYSIS OF ANNUAL MINIMUM AIR TEMPERATURE TRENDS IN SÃO PAULO STATEConsidering that some global warming investigations are based on historical series of air temperature, a question that should be raised is about the influence of urban heat sources on the weather stations areas. The first approach to answering this question is to verify if different weather stations that are geographically close to each others, show elevation trends starting at the same time, possible related to global radiative forcing. However, if these trends start at quite different period among the several weather stations, the elimination of local radiative forcing as the main responsible for this trend is not possible. The aim of this work was to detect continuous trends in annual minimum air temperature series of six weather stations of the State of São Paulo, Brazil. The initial date of those trends was also evaluated. The series were fitted to the normal distribution. The Mann-Kendall test did not detected elevation trends starting at the same time among the analyzed series. Thus, local radiative forcing seems to be a more important factor, responsible for the average increase of the meteorological variable under investigation, than global radiative forcing. The results also indicate that local factors, such as urbanization influences, have to be evaluated and isolated in global warming or agricultural zo...