Abstract
The losses in the Brazilian Cerrado raise the need to understand the border regions between human activities and Cerrado remnants. This work aims to answer the questions: How does the landscape change in a deforestation area in the Brazilian Cerrado, and where do the losses of native Cerrado occur in the landscape context? We chose the Cerrado of Bahia, an area of the agricultural frontier, and used landscape metrics, and land use and land cover data from 2013 and 2020, to quantify the changes in the landscape. We built a typology of landscape patterns to classify and characterize the Cerrado landscapes, based on the landscape metrics, and land use and land cover data from TerraClass Cerrado 2013. From these parameters, a decision tree classifier enabled the classification of the landscape types. Then, we used the yearly deforestation data from PRODES Cerrado to obtain the native cover and the landscape metrics for 2020. The predominant landscape in 2013 was the Intermediate Stage of Fragmentation (32.53%), followed by the Initial Stage of Fragmentation (31.26%), Consolidated Pasture (16.4%), Consolidated Agriculture (9.78%), Mixed Landscapes (5.59%) and Native Cerrado (4.70%). The continuous Cerrado borders on areas in an initial and intermediate stage of fragmentation, putting pressure on the native area. The losses in native cover do not occur in consolidated landscapes or inside the continuous Cerrado. Instead, there is a process of vegetation conversion over the landscapes in the initial and intermediate stages of fragmentation, and landscapes where the matrix is heterogeneous. These factors signal the need to preserve the contiguous fragments of Cerrado.
Highlights
Economic interests as well as socioeconomic aspects, such as increased demographic density, together with programs to encourage the development and construction of highways, agriculture, and cattle activities can work as drivers of the agricultural frontier expansion and deforestation in tropical biomes [1,2,3]
The deforestation processes affect the landscape structure in the study area by reducing the size and number of patches and increasing the amount of edge in the area. This result highlights the importance of this region to preserve the biome, since the Cerrado native cover is still dominant in the region, the opposite found for the entire biome [19]
The losses in the native cover in the northern Cerrado have been reported in other studies [31,36], but the typology map made it possible to understand in the finest resolution where the losses in Cerrado native cover are happening and to relate them to landscape patterns
Summary
Economic interests as well as socioeconomic aspects, such as increased demographic density, together with programs to encourage the development and construction of highways, agriculture, and cattle activities can work as drivers of the agricultural frontier expansion and deforestation in tropical biomes [1,2,3]. The Tropical Savanna Biomes (TGB— Tropical Grassy Biomes) are the biomes that include savannas and grasslands Those biomes are under pressure due to land cover changes that affect biodiversity and biogeochemical cycles [4]. Inserted in this context, the Cerrado, or the Brazilian Savanna, faces deforestation impacts over its native area [5]. In addition to its biodiversity importance, the Cerrado is highly relevant for the balance of biogeochemical cycles, maintained by their fire regimes This region is important for its high population concentration (approximately 46 million inhabitants) and the expressive agricultural production in its territory (approximately 17.43 Mha of the three main products, soy, corn, and cotton, in 2014) [4,8]. The region known as MATOPIBA that corresponds to the states of Maranhão, Tocantins, Piauí, and Bahia had a population estimated at 5.9 million people and produced approximately 2.2 Mha of soy, corn, and cotton in 2016 [8]
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