Impact of Priority and Protected Areas on Deforestation in Brazilian Legal Amazon

Sammanfattning: Legal Amazon, the Brazilian region where much of the global tropical forest is located, has suffered from rapid deforestation for decades, undermining the provision of ecosystem services and the conservation of biodiversity on local and global scales. In order to prevent deforestation, the Brazilian government has established priority and protected areas to ensure the preservation of high biodiversity areas and ecosystem services. This study analyses whether the establishment of priority and protected areas have an impact in preventing deforestation, thus promoting biodiversity and ecosystem services. Furthermore, this study also analyses the extent to which deforestation affects priority areas for biodiversity conservation. Deforestation datasets from 2001 to 2014 of the Legal Amazon was processed and analyzed. The total area and density of deforestation were compared across three categories of land: (1) protected priority areas, (2) unprotected priority areas, and (3) non-priority areas. Spatial methods of geoprocessing and the statistical method one-way ANOVA were used to analyse the deforestation trends. As a result, the deforestation density was found to be lowest inside protected areas than in unprotected areas and non-priority areas. This implied that land-use restrictions in protected areas had more impact compared to unprotected areas and non-priority areas. Furthermore, deforestation has been more intensive in regions of lower biodiversity importance. Despite this positive evaluation, substantial tracts of forest had been converted within regions of high biodiversity importance. Therefore, the regulation of priority and protected areas must be evaluated and improved in the future.