Permanent Preservation Areas (APP) on hilltops in the state of Rio de Janeiro: an evaluation of legal provisions in different geomorphological units

ABSTRACT

The Permanent Preservation Areas (APP), established by the Forest Code in 1965, depict an integrating element of the landscape as defined by the National Plan of Protected Areas. However, the Native Vegetation Protection Law, approved in 2012, has produced several changes in the parameters for the delimitation of APP, especially in those that define APPs on hilltops. As a result, to recover part of the lost area, in 2014, the State Environmental Institute of Rio de Janeiro (INEA) published the Resolution 93, which established its own methodology of delimitation for the state. The goal of this study is to analyze the spatial distribution of the hilltop APP through mapping and calculating landscape metrics, based on legal provisions applied in four areas with different geomorphological units that represent most of the Rio de Janeiro’s relief, considering the Forest Code of 1965, the Native Vegetation Protection Law of 2012, and the INEA Resolution of 2014. APP mapping was done by spatial digital automatic mode and the use of a Digital Terrain Model at 1:25.000 scale. The results showed that the changes in the parameters that delimit the APP on hilltops resulted in a significant reduction of area (up to 85%) and number patches (up to 95%), as well as the increase of the average distance (from 135 m to > 800 m) between hilltop APP patches. It was observed that the distribution of APP is preserved in all geomorphological units mapped with the Forest Code of 1965, while in the other legal scenarios the indicators are worse, as the relief becomes less rugged. Thus, it can be concluded that the Native Vegetation Protection Law of 2012 leads to a fragmented landscape with the close extinction of the hilltop APP. The scenario is mitigated by Resolution 93, that preserves part of the APP only in the rugged relief, while the Forest Code of 1965 has the best indicators that represent the extension, connectivity and the spatial arrangement in the studied geomorphologic units. In this way, the changes on legal provisions represent a scenario of greater fragmentation and smaller structural connectivity between the hilltops.

Keywords:
Protected areas; Geo-processing; Environmental law