Landscape Ecology and Geotechnologies as Tools for the Management of Biological Conservation

Abstract

Tropical forests, such as the Atlantic Forest, are among the most relevant forest formations regarding the provision of environmental ecosystem services, however, after centuries of human expansion, most of the Atlantic Forest is reduced to forest patches. This work aimed to map and analyse the landscape structure of the Atlantic Forest remnants in the city of Goiana, PE, Brazil. For that, metric indexes of landscape ecology were used, with the description of the spatial elements that determine the existing ecological processes and their importance on biological conservation in an Atlantic Forest patch, located in the municipality of Goiana, PE, Brazil. The native vegetation remnants map was obtained through supervised classification process, using images from LANDSAT 8 sensor, in the QGIS 2.18.9 computational application, and the SCP (Semi-Automatic Classification Plugin) with the Maximum Likelihood algorithm. The landscape ecology analysis was performed in the ArcGIS 10.1 software, aided by the Vector-based Landscape Analysis Tools Extension (V-LATE) 2.0 beta. The native vegetation fragmentation was related to the size class which they belong, observing the landscape ecology indexes for each class to compare the vegetation patches conservation degree and size. That way, the map of the native vegetation occupied areas for the year of 2017 was obtained, with 241 patches being identified, of which approximately 45% were classified as very small patches. Therefore, it was noticed that there is a high degree of fragmentation in that region that can lead to the reduction of biodiversity. The smaller patches also presented higher edge density and greater edge effect. In relation to the proximity, when analysed together and with no size class distinction, the degree of isolation decreased dramatically, which indicates the importance of the smaller patches for the landscape and the ecological processes.