Abstract
The Guamá River basin, in the northeastern state of Pará, eastern Amazon, Brazil, encompasses approximately 1,200,000 hectares. It presents great economic and social importance and is under significantly changes in land use and land cover. The objective of this work was to analyze and characterize the landscape structure of this basin through landscape ecology indexes (density, size, metric variability, shape, core area, proximity indexes, and patch area index). Land use and land cover maps were developed using images from the RapidEye system through supervised digital classification. The vegetation and landscape structure were quantified in patches, classes, and land cover. The forest patches were associated with partial conservation of some areas where production sectors had not yet directly affected, or those from natural regeneration of abandoned areas, mainly pastures. The class vegetated area was the second class most representative of the Guamá River basin covered about 37% considering the total area. The basin landscape presented more than 34,000 vegetated area patches It showing that this class are very fragmented by the presence of a large number of small patches, with this the basin landscape is compromised regarding its ecological integrity, since more than half of its forest patches are in edge environments. The indexes enabled a good joint analysis of the sub-basins of the Guamá River basin, resulting in a more detailed overview of the forest fragmentation process.
Highlights
The Amazon region has presented increases in anthropogenic actions on natural environments in the last decades, intensifying processes that replace natural vegetation by other land covers
Studies on forest fragmentation have diagnosed factors and applied different indexes that assist in understanding the landscape dynamics and functions and the changes in the landscape caused by anthropogenic actions (Pereira et al 2015)
The vegetation and landscape structure were quantified in patches, use classes, and land cover (Mcgarigal & Marks 1994; Mcgarigal et al 2009), considering the following indexes: a) Density, size, and metric variability: number of patches (NP) - number of patches that comprise each class; patch density (PD) - number of patches per unit of area (100 ha); GEOGRAPHY, ENVIRONMENT, SUSTAINABILITY
Summary
The Amazon region has presented increases in anthropogenic actions on natural environments in the last decades, intensifying processes that replace natural vegetation by other land covers. These interventions had converted extensive and continuous areas covered with forests into agriculture, urban areas, and other covers, causing environmental impacts. Studies on forest fragmentation have diagnosed factors and applied different indexes that assist in understanding the landscape dynamics and functions and the changes in the landscape caused by anthropogenic actions (Pereira et al 2015). Studies on dynamics of land use and land cover (LULC), mainly in large areas such as the Amazon region, are based on the analysis of remote sensing data (Klimanova et al 2017)
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