Manual of Landscape Analysis: Volume 1: Procedures for the execution of land use and land cover mapping.
Abstract
The National Forest Inventory (IFN-BR) aims to inform the formulation and implementation of public policies for the development, use and conservation of forest resources, as well as the management of these resources, through sufficient, reliable and periodically updated information collected in the field. Also, the National Environment Policy in Brazil aims to preserve, improve and recover the environmental quality conducive to life, in order to ensure conditions for socioeconomic development, national security interests and the protection of the dignity of human life. In this way, the overall objective of the National Environmental Policy is divided into preservation, improvement and recovery of the environment. In order to implement actions related to such objectives, diagnostic and analytical tools are required to map and evaluate ecosystems and the respective services provided in their territories, both spatially explicit. Hence the need to include spatial data and indicators in the analysis. In this evaluation, it is also necessary to translate the results of technical-scientific approaches into information comprehensible for the implementation of public policies and decision making, which can be done through maps, indicators, reports and graphs. Thus, Embrapa Florestas developed, together with the Brazilian Forest Service (SFB) and with the support of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), a methodology for the spatial analysis of landscape structure in the context of IFN-BR . The objective of the so-called Landscape Component within the IFN-BR project, throughout the different editions, is to observe the dynamics of forest use through orbital images, at scales compatible with national and state interests and using, such as changes in land use and forest fragmentation. In this way, information must be produced on the importance and quality of forest resources in relation to other land uses, in landscape scale, highlighting their functions, quality and incidental pressures, in order to subsidize the formulation of public policies that are the region and its scale of approach. Landscape analysis complements two other components of the IFN-BR, field data collection and socioeconomic survey, and is intended to monitor the forest component on a landscape scale over time. In this context are inserted the so-called Landscape Sample Units (UAPs), through which the IFN-BR Landscape Component is implemented, designed to offer a tooling that allows the user to view aspects of the landscape in the form of indicators and their respective indices. The UAPs are permanent sampling areas of 100 km2, distributed systematically in a grid of 40 km × 40 km over the whole national territory, making a total of approximately 5500 units. All UAPs contain an IFN-BR Field Sampling Unit, in the form of a conglomerate, located in its geometric center. Thus, the strategy adopted was to develop the methodology of all IFN-BR components with a view to their integration and subsequent joint analysis. Since they provide the possibility of static, i.e. once only, or dynamic analyses - when indexes are calculated on successive occasions - UAPs are diagnostic and monitoring units. The basis for calculating landscape indices and subsequent analyzes is the map of land use and coverage, obtained through pixel-to-pixel classification processes and object-oriented image analysis. Thus, the indicators and indexes of the landscape allow to establish an integrated diagnosis of each UAP, which, in turn, reflects a certain combination of biogeoclimatic characteristics (territorial class or ecoregion), associated with anthropic or natural factors of influence that occur in that locality. This manual is attached to the detailed description of the procedures for mapping land use and coverage, adopting a methodology that involves the use of generic rules for the classification of image objects.