ANALYSIS OF THE ENVIRONMENTAL QUALITY OF THE POTENGI RIVER, MUNICIPALITY OF SÃO PAULO DO POTENGI-RN, AS AN INSTRUMENT OF ENVIRONMENTAL EDUCATION
Environmental Sensitization; Environmental Monitoring; Water Resources.
The understanding of the importance of the rivers starts from the involvement of the local actors with their living environment. The Potengi river, located in the municipality of São Paulo do Potengi/RN, contributed to the origin and development of the locality, constituting itself as a relevant instrument for environmental awareness and construction of new knowledge. In view of this reality, it was aimed to carry out the environmental characterization and to verify the water quality of the Potengi river in areas inserted in said municipality, through the vision of high school students of a public school, as a subsidy for the Environmental Education process. The study is carried out using the qualitative-quantitative method adapted from Branco (2004) and under Bayesian inference, occurring in rural and urban areas, dividing into two stages. The first one corresponded to the environmental mapping through the Landsat 3, 5 and 8 satellites. In the second stage, field visits were made along with the students to characterize the areas and later the water quality (visual assessment) through 09 parameters, whose comparison will be carried out between dry and rainy periods. In this way, the multitemporal analysis of the ciliary vegetation of the Potengi river was carried out, comparing the vegetal conditions through the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) in the years 1978, 1986 and 2017 and the changes occurred due to several anthropogenic activities, evidencing that the areas located in the urban area suffered greater degradation, such as irregular occupation of the soil, the construction of reservoirs, floods of residences and loss of biodiversity, resulting in environmental, social and economic damages.