Protected areas of Brazil’s coastal- marine system: spatial modeling and conservation planning on biomes – ocean interface

Abstract

The limits of the six biomes of the Brazilian territory (i.g. Amazon, Atlantic Forest, Cerrado, Caatinga, Pampa and Pantanal) were recently revised,1 and a new territorial section of the ocean-continent interface, called Marine Coastal System (CMS) was presented. However, despite being a central theme for conservation planning, the spatial relationship between federal conservation units of Brazil (FCU) and CMS remained without integration. In this work we investigate ecological and territorial representativeness of FCU on Brazil's four geopolitical regions with biomes and ocean interface by developing spatial modeling (five models) encompassing a broad biogeographic context. The objective was to determine the spatial relationship between CMS and FCU, through the application of a set of topological and algebraic rules. Maps of spatial distribution of the FCU in the 5 biomes and in the 4 geopolitical regions shows overlapping CMS. The results indicate that among the 63 FCU found by the M_5 model, 51 FCU present a territorial sharing area with 5 biomes: Amazon, Pampa, Atlantic Forest, Caatinga and Cerrado. In the Amazon and Pampa biomes occur the largest area of overlap with the CMS, but the highest concentration of FCU occurs in the Atlantic Forest biome. The CMS area in the Northeastern region presented the highest environmental heterogeneity, and overlaps four biomes, encompassed most of the FCU of the ocean-continent interface, and also evidenced that the lack of integration of both legal concepts and government databases might cause differences on ecological and territorial representativeness of FCU on Brazil's four geopolitical regions with biomes-ocean interface.