MACROINVERTEBRADOS AQUÁTICOS COMO BIOINDICADORES NO PROCESSO DE LICENCIAMENTO AMBIENTAL NO BRASIL

Licenciamento ambiental no Brasil é um procedimento com vários níveis e etapas, concebido como ferramenta preventiva aos potenciais danos ambientais causados pela implantação de empreendimentos. Embora este procedimento seja obrigatório desde meados da década de 1980, ainda é limitado no que diz respeito ao uso de informações biológicas para a avaliação e o monitoramento de ambientes aquáticos. Neste processo, o órgão licenciador (federal, estadual ou municipal) define as variáveis a serem medidas, tendo como referência o tipo e a magnitude do empreendimento e as características específicas do local proposto para sua instalação. Respostas biológicas devem ser usadas para medir os impactos sobre ecossistemas aquáticos e os macroinvertebrados constituem um grupo que apresenta vantagens como bioindicadores, sendo os mais utilizados para este fim. Em 2011, o Grupo de Trabalho Intersetorial em Biomonitoramento foi criado para discutir o uso de macroinvertebrados em programas de monitoramento. Este trabalho apresenta as reflexões e propostas deste grupo e fornece subsídios para a inclusão destes organismos nos termos de referência a serem aplicados nos processos de licenciamento ambiental no Brasil

Property size drives differences in forest code compliance in the Brazilian Cerrado

International audienceThe Rural Environmental Registry (CAR) dataset opens a new window for spatially explicit studies of the rural landscape of Brazil, enabling analysis with an accurate representation of land use and land cover change dynamics at the property level. Here, we evaluated farm compliance with the Brazilian Forest Code (revised in 2012) in Mato Grosso do Sul state, where agribusiness activities have already converted more than 70% of native vegetation, Cerrado. We analysed the most recent version of the CAR dataset, using geographic information system analytical tools. We observed a positive relationship between compliance with the 20% compulsory Legal Reserves and farm size class. We showed that larger, rather than smaller, farms have important effects on biodiversity conservation at the landscape scale. Large farms (> than 1000 ha), comprising 74.2% of the study area, tended to show better compliance levels (51%) than smaller properties (33%). At the same time, they contain huge amount of land with native vegetation that lies outside Legal Reserves, and so may pose a risk for legal deforestation of near 2 million ha. We argue that a portfolio of socioeconomic incentives for restoration, protected areas, and nonet loss components in agricultural programmes, are essential measures to increase compliance and halt deforestation in the Cerrado of Central Brazil. Moreover, we argue that considering property size improves the likelihood of success of such initiatives. Although acknowledging that landscape management can help address socioeconomic conflicts and improve food production, it must be accompanied by a strong "anti-deforestation" policy to guarantee the maintenance of existing native vegetation remnants. We also highlight the importance of investigating the role of property size in maintaining remaining vegetation in this region, instead of merely focused on the number of compliant farms

Incorporating resilience and cost in ecological restoration strategies at landscape scale

The restoration of deforested or degraded areas can contribute to biodiversity conservation and global resilience given the current and projected impacts of climate change. In recent years, a robust array of ecological restoration frameworks have been generated to address restoration challenges at large scales in different ecosystems around the world. Unfortunately, the costs associated with restoration at such scales greatly challenges the implementation of such frameworks. We used landscape ecology principles with multicriteria optimization of landscape resilience and agricultural productivity as a way to mitigate the trade-offs between production and restoration. We used the Cerrado biome in Mato Grosso do Sul State, Brazil, as a case study to apply our framework. We compared three scenarios: minimal legal compliance (MLC); selection by ecological resilience (SER); and selection by restoration cost (SRC). Our results show that increasing the restoration target from MLC (25%) to SER (30%) means moving from 968,316 to 1592 million hectares, which can represent a huge opportunity cost for agricultural lands. However, because costs and resilience are not homogeneously distributed throughout landscapes, we can select areas of intermediate ecological resilience and low cost, for the same restoration area target. This process can reduce potential conflicts and make restoration a more viable process. Our results also reveal some areas that can be particularly important for reconciling agriculture and landscape restoration. Those areas combined high and intermediate resilience and an above average profitability. This could mean that increasing restoration in this area could be very expensive, assuming that our proxy roughly represents the restoration implementation cost. However, there is another important message here, that some areas can be productive at the same time that they maintain levels of resilience above the legal compliance, which facilitates win-win scenarios in human-dominated landscapes