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The process of desertification, which extends from a long time ago, became a reality in Brazil. This phenomenon can be understood as land degradation, caused by factors including climatic changes and human activities. Besides being a threat to biodiversity, causes loss of soil productivity, threatening the lives of thousands of people living in affected regions. So, the identification of affected areas is essential to diagnose and prevent the problem. Satellite image has been a source of relatively low cost and widely used in this task. Therefore, is proposed in this study, a method to extract automatically areas heavily affected by desertification. The method is based on concepts of mathematical morphology, vegetation index and classification of digital images. Experiments are conducted separately, with images of CBERS 2 and 2B, and subsequently compared. The validation is done by crossing the results obtained with a reference image, created by a manual process.