TITLE:
Landscape Structural Indicators as a Tool to Assess Land Use Changes in Planning for Sub-Basin Sustainability (Southeastern Brazil)
AUTHORS:
Angela Terumi Fushita, José Eduardo dos Santos, Imyra Maíra Martins de Souza, Eduarda Romanini, Rômulo Theodoro Costa
KEYWORDS:
Land Use, Quantifiable Indicator, Urbanity Index, Landscape Vulnerability Indicator
JOURNAL NAME:
Journal of Water Resource and Protection,
Vol.8 No.4,
April
29,
2016
ABSTRACT: Land use
is shaped by the interactions between nature and society, and these
interactions can inhibit environmental sustainability and deplete the natural
capital that provides the ecosystem services upon which humans depend. Urbanity
Index and Landscape Vulnerability Indicator have been proposed to improve the
impact interpretability of land use changes on sub-basin sustainability for
local scenarios of biodiversity conservation. A time series of LandSat 5
Thematic Mapper remote sensing data from São Carlos municipality, Southeastern
Brazil, for the years 1989, 2004 and 2014 revealed that land use changes in the
sub-basins do not take place in a progressive and gradual way. Over the 25-year
period, the main trends showed the loss and increase of forest cover so that it
has remained quantitatively similar over time due to reduced agricultural land
use. The aggregation of both indicators enabled the identification of greater
naturalness and lower vulnerability, as well as lower naturalness and higher
vulnerability under local sub-basin conditions, pointing the need for different
strategies for sub-basin biodiversity conservation and sustainability. These
preliminary scenarios provide a way to communicate problems of environmental
sustainability at different landscape scales to the scientific community as
well as to planners, policy makers and the broader public.