Landscape ecology applied to territorial order and forest management: methodological procedures

Abstract

In order to contribute to the advancement of scientific research on Landscape Ecology in the context of spatial planning and forest management of natural resources, this study aimed to gather and discuss the main concepts and themes on Landscape Ecology, to address the use of geotechnology for structural analysis and landscape metrics. Based on national and international bibliographic review, relatively from the most classic to the most recent studies on the subject. The bases of the scientific journals used were: Web of Science, Scielo (National), Science Direct, Scopus, Google Scholar and Brazilian Digital Library of Theses. Key concepts and applications in the areas of environmental and forest sciences were highlighted in order to evaluate strategies and decision making in rural environmental planning and management. In this work, we also presented the methodological procedure for calculating the landscape metrics, through the Patch Analyst extension, applied to the ArcGIS Software. We compiled information from 50 scientific articles published in Brazil and abroad, where significant relevance and feasibility of the use of indexes and metrics of Ecology of Landscapes for geographic and ecological purposes was verified, although, it was verified that there are gaps to be filled on the theme in Brazil, in relation to the scientific productions, still scarce, especially with more concrete and directed analyzes. The study allowed the expansion of theoretical knowledge about the subject in the country and is expected to be an integral and subsidiary to other studies on environmental restoration, connection of landscapes, forest mosaics and land use planning.