Abstract

BackgroundThe Brazilian Amazon is the world’s largest rainforest regions and plays a key role in biodiversity conservation as well as climate adaptation and mitigation. The government has created a network of protected areas (PAs) to ensure long-term conservation of the region. However, despite the importance of and positive advances in the establishment of PAs, natural resource depletion in the Brazilian Amazon is pervasive.MethodsWe evaluated a total of 4,243 official law enforcement records generated between 2010 and 2015 to understand the geographical distribution of the illegal use of resources in federal PAs in the Brazilian Amazon. We classified illegal activities into ten categories and used generalized additive models (GAMs) to evaluate the relationship between illegal use of natural resources inside PAs with management type, age of PAs, population density, and accessibility.ResultsWe found 27 types of illegal use of natural resources that were grouped into 10 categories of illegal activities. Most infractions were related to suppression and degradation of vegetation (37.40%), followed by illegal fishing (27.30%) and hunting activities (18.20%). The explanatory power of the GAMs was low for all categories of illegal activity, with a maximum explained variation of 41.2% for illegal activities as a whole, and a minimum of 14.6% for hunting activities.DiscussionThese findings demonstrate that even though PAs are fundamental for nature conservation in the Brazilian Amazon, the pressures and threats posed by human activities include a broad range of illegal uses of natural resources. Population density up to 50 km from a PA is a key variable, influencing illegal activities. These threats endanger long-term conservation and many efforts are still needed to maintain PAs that are large enough and sufficiently intact to maintain ecosystem functions and protect biodiversity.

Highlights

  • The Brazilian Amazon is one of the world’s largest rainforest regions and plays a key role in biodiversity conservation, maintenance of ecosystem services, and storage of terrestrial carbon stocks (Laurance et al, 2001)

  • We evaluated the illegal use of natural resources within 118 federal protected areas (PAs) in the Brazilian Amazon, through the analysis of 4,243 illegal activities obtained from law enforcement activities in the period of 2010–2015

  • The data used as explanatory variables were obtained from the following publicly available sources: a shapefile describing the geographic boundaries of the Amazon biome from Ministério do Meio Ambiente (MMA, 2016); a shapefile describing the geographic boundaries of federal PAs from Instituto Chico Mendes de Conservacão da Biodiversidade (ICMBio, 2016b); shapefiles describing water bodies and rivers from Agência Nacional de Águas (ANA, 2013); a shapefile describing roads at 1:250,000, and limits of Brazil and South America from Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística (IBGE) (IBGE/DGC, 2015); and shapefiles describing the populational ‘‘grid’’ of Brazil from IBGE (IBGE, 2016a)

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Summary

Introduction

The Brazilian Amazon is one of the world’s largest rainforest regions and plays a key role in biodiversity conservation, maintenance of ecosystem services, and storage of terrestrial carbon stocks (Laurance et al, 2001). Recent studies have indicated that PAs can reduce deforestation and pave the way to a more sustainable use of the region’s natural resources (Barber et al, 2012; Nepstad et al, 2014; Nepstad et al, 2006; Nepstad et al, 2009; Pfaff et al, 2015) Despite all these recent efforts, natural resource degradation in the Brazilian Amazon is still pervasive and PAs are subjected to several pressures and threats. Population density up to 50 km from a PA is a key variable, influencing illegal activities These threats endanger long-term conservation and many efforts are still needed to maintain PAs that are large enough and sufficiently intact to maintain ecosystem functions and protect biodiversity

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