Zoning of the conservationist use potential in the hydrographic basin of the Sinos River – RS

Abstract

The hydrographic basin of the Sinos river concentrates an intense agricultural and industrial activity in its territory, which over the years has caused an environmental imbalance and a compromise of its natural resources. Understanding the basin as a territorial management unit, it is necessary to improve and create tools that help in the management of this territory. In this sense, this article aims to apply an environmental zoning methodology, called Conservationist Use Potential (CUP), with the purpose of stratifying the basin territory in levels of natural use potential. For this, geospatial soil, lithology and slope bases of the region were used as input data of this model, determining weights for these variables through an Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). From this, the levels of CUP of the basin of the Sinos river, which were combined with a map of the region’s land use and cover to diagnose the conservation levels of the area. The results showed that in the basin predominate the levels of potential use between “Medium” and “High”. The basin has a certain level of conservation in its high course land use, which combines with the “Low” and “Very Low” levels of CUP present there. The main challenge is the need of adapting agricultural and industrial activities in the medium and low course of the basin, where the “High” and “Very High” potential use levels are found, in order to promote the sustainable use of environmental resources present there and the mitigation of the environmental impacts of these activities.