Multicriteria Site Prioritization for Land Rehabilitation in the Guapi-Macacu Watershed, Rio de Janeiro

Abstract

Progressing land degradation is of increasing global concern because it deteriorates essential ecosystem features, functions, and services as observed in our study area in the highly fragmented Mata Atlantica biome, RJ, Brazil. The prioritization of sites for land rehabilitation is a frequent task for environmental managers and essential to develop urgently needed public policies. Hence, we present a GIS-based tool based on ecological principles for the selection of reforestation sites by integrating data on pasture degradation and landscape fragmentation. Thereby, the prioritized areas do not only represent opportunities for increasing forest cover and enhancing forest connectivity but also for reducing the area of degraded pastures. From our perspective, the inclusion of spatial information on degraded pastures is essential, since many of these areas have lost important ecological and economic function and should thus be prioritized for intervention. Data on degraded pastures and forest cover used in this study are derived from high- and medium-resolution satellite imagery. Other spatial data are derived from a digital elevation model (DEM) with 20 m resolution. The multicriteria analysis for the data integration was conducted using ESRI ArcGIS and the open-source software ILWIS.