O uso do planejamento sistemático da conservação no zoneamento de unidades de conservação no Amazonas

Abstract

Many criteria can be used to plan a protected area, including primary and secondary data about the region of interest. Some researchers have suggested that the costs relative to the planning process could be lowered if some of the criteria, the ones which require field study, were eliminated. Nevertheless, the decision-making process and the criteria s relative weight in such process are not usually explained in the creation or zoning reports of conservation units in the Brazilian Amazon. Therefore, in this study we used computational tools from Systematic Conservation Planning PSC, to evaluate the relative weight of different criteria used in the zoning process of a conservation unit s mosaic in the south of the Amazonas state (Apuí Mosaic). We used the Marxan program to define the Mosaic s preservation zones, which had been previously zoned by the area managers using conventional methods. The objectives were to determine which of the criteria used by the managers were necessary to obtain the same zoning using PSC tools, and to determine a posteriori which criteria had more influence in the decision-making about the preservation zones limits. In order to do that, we calibrated the parameters of the software s objective function to generate a zoning configuration similar to the one produced by the managers. Criteria related to the site s biodiversity distribution were not included in the analyses, since the information needed to generate layers representing such distribution were not available to the managers at the time they elaborated the zoning. Using the same criteria used by managers, the software generated a zoning that was very similar to the one chosen by the managing organ regarding the parks (KIA 0,77), but a less similar one when it came to the preservation zones outside the parks (KIA 0,55). Nevertheless, the only criterion needed in the redoing of the zoning using PSC was the Mosaic s phytophysiognomy. Criteria listed by managers related to the influence caused by threats to the biodiversity in the area (land-grabbing, mining and roads) had to be either reduced or removed in order for the PSC zoning to became more similar to the one designed by the managing organ, for both parks (KIA 0,84) and other preservation zones (KIA 0,59). The fact that a high level of similarity between the two zonings was dependent on the removal of criteria related to threats to the biodiversity shows that they were not considered important by the managing organ in the zoning definition. The posterior analysis using PSC tools supports the researchers conclusions which showed that some criteria used in traditional zoning are not needed in the initial phases of protected areas planning. The use of PSC tools in the zoning elaboration could allow managers to create initial zoning scenarios using only previously available technical information about the region, reducing in this way the costs and time needed to elaborate such zonings, furthermore it could also clarify the weights attributed to the criteria used in the zoning.