Diagnosis of forest fragmentation in the Buranhém river basin – far-south Bahia: metrics and landscape connectivity

Abstract

The main objective of this work is to carry out an environmental diagnosis of the forest fragmentation of BH on the Buranhém River located in the Far-South of the state of Bahia, using geotechnologies and landscape metrics from the perspective of landscape ecology. Initially, the basin was divided into three areas, starting to quantify which area has the greatest number of fragments. To analyze landscape fragmentation, images from the Sentinel-2 satellite were used, in which, using supervised classification, it was possible to map and quantify forest fragments. Subsequently, the Circularity Index (CI) was calculated to measure the fragments most susceptible to edge effects. Of the 22,453 fragments mapped, 94.8% are smaller than 5 ha. In area 2 there is a greater concentration of forest fragments, exceeding 250 hectares. Regarding the edge effect, the majority (74.2%) of the fragments have low susceptibility to the edge effect. In this way, it is concluded that the vegetation of the Atlantic forest is quite fragmented in the basin, with the expansion of the pasture matrix, if planning and environmental protection measures are not renewed, the tendency of the larger fragments is to be more susceptible to border effect.