The historical geography, bioclimatic, and informetric conditions of protected areas in the Brazilian Cerrado

Abstract

Protected areas (PAs) are crucial to the conservation of biodiversity and ecosystem services. Moreover, the creation, management, and efficiency of PAs are associated with the historical geography (the type of PA and number of PAs over the years), bioclimatic sufficiency, and informetric factors (number of papers and number of hits on the internet). These variables vary across the PA network, and combining these factors can help to understand biases of PAs and the future direction to preserve the Brazilian Cerrado biodiversity. In this paper, we evaluated the historical geography, bioclimatic representation, and informetric factors of the Brazilian Cerrado PAs. Although the number of PAs and the cumulative area of PAs has increased significantly, we detected that some new PAs are overlapping other PAs. The overlapping was not idiosyncratic, where some PAs categorized overlapped more than others. The number of papers and hits of PAs on the internet showed a positive correlation and asymmetric distribution, where most PAs had few papers/hits. The bioclimatic variables registered in PAs did not contemplate all bioclimatic variabilities found in the Cerrado. Thus, new areas are fundamental to increase the sufficiency of the PA network and to conserve the Cerrado biome. Our summarized analysis revealed that some variables showed a positive correlation, for example, age, area, number of papers, number of hits, and some PA categories. Finally, our results indicated concordance of some biases, e.g., historical geography and informetric factors. Besides, we recommend the addition of new PAs to increase the sufficiency of the Cerrado PA network.