Abstract
The intensification of deforestation and the consequent fragmentation of the natural landscape in urban and periurban watersheds affect the entire eco-hydrological system, increasing the need to understand how these changes can affect their sustainability. In this sense, the present study evaluated the potential implications of forest fragmentation for the management of the Tarumã-Açu basin, based on the characterization of the structural and functional patterns of the landscape. For this, we mapped and categorized the basin’s forest fragments, based on the supervised classification (Bhattacharyya Method) of Landsat/OLI image, and, subsequently, we calculated the landscape metrics (area, density and size, edge, form, core, isolation and connectivity). The metrics showed a very fragmented landscape, especially in the region of the basin's low course, which concentrates the smallest, most dispersed, and vulnerable fragments even in conservation units. The headwater region, on the other hand, has the largest patches, with a large amount of central area and high structural and functional connectivity, which are fundamental for the sustainability of the basin and, therefore, deserve attention and prioritization by managers. The results offer important subsidies and unpublished data that can contribute to elaboration of the basin’s management plan and for the definition of conservation and restoration strategies of the forest remnants, indicating priority areas for the implementation of these actions.
Highlights
The Amazon basin accommodates 10–15% of terrestrial biodiversity and most of the remnants of tropical forests in the world, still constituting an important source of atmospheric moisture, freshwater entering the oceans and carbon storage — 150–200 billion tons (Fearnside, 2016; Nobre et al, 2016)
The present study aimed to evaluate the potential implications of forest fragmentation for the management of the Tarumã-Açu River basin (TARB), based on the characterization of the structural and functional patterns of the landscape
The mapping identified 683 forest fragments distributed in 5 size classes, which correspond to 66.50% of the total area of TARB
Summary
The Amazon basin accommodates 10–15% of terrestrial biodiversity and most of the remnants of tropical forests in the world, still constituting an important source of atmospheric moisture, freshwater entering the oceans (approximately 15%) and carbon storage — 150–200 billion tons (Fearnside, 2016; Nobre et al, 2016). According to Nobre et al (2016), the conversion of forests to anthropogenic uses in this region affects hydrology, climate and biogeochemical flows at different spatial scales. These changes in the Amazonian land use and land cover are driven by variables and complex political and socioeconomic interactions, which have reduced contiguous forests to smaller fragments (< 400 ha), irregular and increasingly isolated (Ruiz-Agudelo et al, 2020). This induces changes in the eco-hydrological dynamics of the landscapes that form the watersheds and puts their sustainability at risk, especially at the local scale (Numata and Cochrane, 2012; Laurance et al, 2018)
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