Spatial Dynamic Modeling of Land Use and Land Cover Change in the Ilha Grande Bay Watershed – Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: A Focus on Native Communities and Conservation Units

Abstract

This work is committed to analyze processes of land use and land cover change in the Ilha Grande Bay Watershed, located in Rio de Janeiro State, southeast of Brazil, from 2013 to 2018, by means of spatial dynamic modeling, with a focus on the role of native communities and conservation units. For this purpose, the Dinamica EGO modeling platform was used, which is designed to simulate land use and land cover change (LUCC) employing the Bayesian weights of evidence method for parameterization and relying on the cellular automata paradigm. Spatio-temporal analyses of LUCC were carried out for twelve sub-watersheds, which are known as planning hydrological units in Brazil, laying emphasis on the transition rates and weights assigned to the native communities and conservation units. In the Fully Protected Conservation Units, a trend of negative weights assigned to deforestation and urbanization transitions was observed. On the other hand, the Sustainable Use Conservation Units revealed a great pressure on the natural coastal environments, where human occupation is prevailing. The native communities present peculiar dynamics within their territories, which mostly prevent urbanization processes to occur. The adopted Bayesian method was able to describe and simulate LUCC in the study area, and its results may support related management initiatives. The weights assigned to the conservation units unravel their behavior with respect to the concerned transitions, and the simulation results yielded satisfactory Fuzzy Similarity Indices. This work enabled the understanding of dynamics occurred within conservation units and native communities, meant to help the formulation of guidelines for land and environmental planning.