O tabuleiro agrícola: Quase um quarto do estado é cana

Cerejo, Lucas Nakamura

doi:10.5281/zenodo.23539779

No. 045 Land use From field to biomethane 1/5

The farming patchwork

Almost a quarter of the state is sugarcane

Record, downloads and citation

Map of São Paulo state with land use and land cover in 2024, in eleven colours. The light green of sugarcane covers almost all of the centre and north of the state, most continuous around Ribeirão Preto. The light brown of soybean and other annual crops forms patches in the south, from Itapeva to Assis. The straw yellow of pasture and the cream of the mosaic of uses prevail in the west and in the Paraíba valley. Orange patches of citrus are scattered across the centre-north, and the dark brown of coffee appears in the north-east, near Franca. The greyish green of native vegetation fills the Serra do Mar and the Ribeira valley, in the south-east; the grey of the cities marks Greater São Paulo, and the blue of the reservoirs traces the Tietê and Paraná rivers. Callouts: Dumont, 80% in sugarcane; Itapeva, 664 km² of soybean and other annual crops. — Fig. 045 São Paulo state (SP) EPSG:4674 Source: MapBiomas, IBGE

In 2024, 72% of São Paulo’s territory was cropland, pasture, tree plantation or a mosaic of these uses, according to MapBiomas. Sugarcane is the largest class: 58,000 km², almost a quarter of the state, and the leading use in 255 of the 645 municipalities. In the Ribeirão Preto region it covers half the land, and in Dumont, 80%. Soybean and other annual crops add up to 7%, mostly in the south, in the Marília region and around Itapeva. Pasture, at 15%, dominates the west: it covers 36% of the Presidente Prudente region. Oranges, coffee and other perennial crops take up less than 2%. Native vegetation, 22% of the state, lies mostly in the Serra do Mar and the Ribeira valley. First plate of the collection “From field to biomethane”, which follows the crops to the gas their residues could give.

Technical record · downloads · citation

At a glance

Layers

municipios polygon 645 municipalities: area (km²) and share of the municipality (%) of each of the eleven classes, total of farming uses and class with the largest area
regioes_intermediarias polygon 11 intermediate geographic regions
limite_estadual polygon State boundary

Metadata

Sources: MapBiomas — Collection 10 of the Annual Series of Land Use and Land Cover Maps of Brazil, 2024 (2024)
IBGE — Municipal Mesh 2025 (2025)
Extent: São Paulo state (SP)
CRS / Projection: SIRGAS 2000 (EPSG:4674)
EPSG:4674
Software: Python · rasterio · GeoPandas · GDAL · QGIS · Node.js · d3-geo
Method: MapBiomas 2024 classification (Collection 10), 30 m pixels, grouped into eleven classes; areas by municipality counted on the 30 m pixels, on the GRS80 ellipsoid; map drawn with the most frequent class in blocks of 4 × 4 pixels (120 m).
Version: v1.0.0
Licence: CC BY 4.0
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.23539779

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The map without a frame, with legend, scale, reference system and credit written on it: ready for papers, lectures and slides. In two versions: with the basemap (neighbours and sea) or only the mapped area, on white.

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How to cite

Cerejo, L. N. (2026). O tabuleiro agrícola: quase um quarto do estado é cana [The farming patchwork: Almost a quarter of the state is sugarcane] (Version 1.0.0) [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23539779

@dataset{cerejo2026_tabuleiro_agricola_sp,
  author    = {Cerejo, Lucas Nakamura},
  title     = {O tabuleiro agrícola: Quase um quarto do estado é cana},
  year      = {2026},
  publisher = {Zenodo},
  version   = {1.0.0},
  doi       = {10.5281/zenodo.23539779},
  url       = {https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23539779},
  language  = {portuguese},
  note      = {English title: The farming patchwork: Almost a quarter of the state is sugarcane. Licence CC BY 4.0}
}

How to read this plate area, projection, scale, legend and source · 5 terms

1 Area: São Paulo state (SP) The area the plate covers. Outside it, neighbours and sea are drawn in grey, just for orientation.
2 Coordinates and projection: SIRGAS 2000 (EPSG:4674) The layers are in SIRGAS 2000; the drawing’s projection is written in the colophon at the foot of the panel.
3 Scale: Graphic scale bar in the panel The scale bar is true on the central meridian; away from it, measured distances vary a little.
4 Legend and layers: 3 layers in the GeoPackage · polygon Read the legend before the map: it tells you whether a colour is a rate or a class, and whether a circle is a total.
5 Sources: MapBiomas (2024); IBGE (2025) Every figure comes from a public source, with its year. The data sheet gives each one’s address.

Terms on this plate

Cane straw: Tops and leaves left in the field by mechanised harvesting since cane burning ended. Some can be collected for energy; some must stay to protect the soil.
Biomethane: Biogas upgraded, with most of the CO₂ removed, to ANP’s specification, at which point it replaces natural gas in the pipeline, in industry and in the lorry’s tank.
Silviculture · planted forest: Forest grown like a crop, almost all eucalyptus and pine, for pulp, charcoal, firewood and timber. The “planted” charcoal on the plates comes from here.
Land cover and land use: What covers each patch of ground (forest, pasture, soy, cane, water, town), read from satellite images year by year. The forty-year plates use MapBiomas’ series, 1985 to 2025, summed by municipality.
MapBiomas: A network of universities, NGOs and companies that classifies land cover across all of Brazil from Landsat images, one map a year since 1985, as open data.

Anatomy of a plate Full glossary

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Layers, table and figures, under CC BY 4.0. Cite with the DOI.

Full record and citation

Method notes · No. 045

Land use and land cover in São Paulo, 2024: the farming patchwork

Português · English

Plate No. 045, the first of six in the collection From field to biomethane: the whole state seen from above, before following each crop to the gas its residues could give.

What the files contain

File / layer	Geometry	Contents
`municipios` (GPKG)	polygon	645 municipalities: `CD_MUN`, `NM_MUN`, intermediate region, `area_km2`; for each class, `km2_<class>` and `pct_<class>` (cana = sugarcane, temporarias = annual crops, citros = citrus, perenes = perennial crops, silvicultura = tree plantation, pastagem = pasture, mosaico = mosaic, nativa = native vegetation, urbano = urban, agua = water, outras = other); `pct_agro` (the first seven added up) and `maior_classe` (largest class)
`regioes_intermediarias` (GPKG)	polygon	11 intermediate geographic regions
`limite_estadual` (GPKG)	polygon	outline of the state
`sp_uso_agropecuario_2024.tif`	grid	MapBiomas classification with the original codes, 120 m, in WGS 84 (EPSG:4326) like the original, clipped to the state, with the plate’s `.qml` style

The GPKG and the GeoTIFF are zipped and attached to the agro-sp-2026 release. The municipios layer carries three QGIS styles: cana (the default), temporarias and pastagem, as a share of the municipality.

The CSV holds the municipal table, in UTF-8, without geometry.

Method

MapBiomas Collection 10 land use and land cover map for 2024, 30 m pixels, read from the public file for Brazil only in the blocks that cover the state.
MapBiomas codes grouped into eleven classes:
- sugarcane (20);
- soybean and other annual crops (soybean, rice, cotton and other annual crops);
- oranges and other citrus;
- coffee and other perennial crops;
- tree plantation;
- pasture;
- mosaic of uses, where the satellite cannot tell crops from pasture;
- native vegetation (forest, savanna and grassland formations, mangrove, restinga and wetlands);
- urban area;
- water;
- mining and other non-vegetated areas, including beaches, dunes and solar farms.
Area of each class by municipality counted on the 30 m pixels, with each pixel’s area on the GRS80 ellipsoid. The total is 248,217 km²; 2.6 km² of unclassified coastal pixels are left out.
The map and the GeoTIFF use the most frequent class in each block of 4 × 4 pixels (120 m). Small crops, such as coffee on hillsides, therefore show less on the map than in the figures.

Limitations

This is an automatic classification of satellite images, with errors that vary from class to class; MapBiomas publishes the accuracy of each one.
The mosaic of uses, 20% of the state, combines crops and pasture that the satellite cannot separate; the 72% in farming uses includes this mosaic.
Land with two harvests a year appears once, with the class MapBiomas assigned for 2024.
PAM harvested area (in the following plates) and the area mapped by MapBiomas measure different things and need not match.

Data licence

MapBiomas data under a CC BY 4.0 licence; cite “MapBiomas Project — Collection 10 of the Annual Series of Land Use and Land Cover Maps of Brazil”. IBGE municipal mesh, free to use with attribution.

View this map’s folder on GitHub