Land use and cover modeling as a tool for analyzing nature conservation policies - A case study of Jureia-Itatins

Land Use and Cover Changes (LUCCs) have been a cause of great concern for socio-environmental sustainability. Applied study in this field should take into account the history of the interaction between man and nature, and the effect on the landscape that this dynamic projects. This paper's objective is to assess LUCCs with regard to the effect of a nature conservation policy and correlate such changes with the practice of shifting cultivation. For that, historical aerial photos of the study site (a protected area located in SAo Paulo, Brazil) were analyzed and Markov and Cellular Automata models were built and compared to simulate different scenarios, including a counterfactual one. The results showed that the policy was important to stop pressures against nature conservation and that there is a lack of correlation between shifting cultivation and reducing forest cover, highlighting the fact that the ban on shifting cultivation, justified by nature conservation, can be overestimated.