Overbeck, G.E., Vélez-Martin, E., Scarano, F.R., Lewinsohn, T.M., Fonseca, C.R., Meyer,
S.T., Müller, S.C., Ceotto, P., Dadalt, L., Durigan, G., Ganade, G., Gossner, M.M.,
Guadagnin, D.L., Lorenzen, K., Jacobi, C.M., Weisser, W.W., Pillar, V.D. (2015)
Conservation in Brazil needs to include non-forest ecosystems. Diversity & Distributions.
DOI: 10.1111/ddi.12380
http://wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/ddi
Supporting Information
Appendix S1 Non-forest ecosystems (NFE) and the Brazilian legislation for protection of
native vegetation
Federal law 12651/2012 has recently updated the most important Brazilian legislation for the
protection of native vegetation. In its provisions, no distinction is made between forest (FE) and
non-forest ecosystems (NFE). We thus consider it inappropriate to keep referring to the new
legislation as “Forest Code” or “Forest Law”, as is currently the case both in the public debate
and in the scientific literature (e.g. Soares-Filho et al. 2014). Consequently, we henceforth refer
to it as Native Vegetation Law. By considering native vegetation as a common good for society,
the law partially restricts property rights of landowners by establishing the amount and the places
where native vegetation has to be protected in each rural property. Here we summarize the key
features of the new legislation with respect to potential legal mechanisms that, if properly
enforced, will increase NFE protection.
According to the new Native Vegetation Law, each rural property must be registered in the Rural
Environmental Registry (CAR), a public electronic record system, with spatially explicit
information on the limits of each rural property, the location of the remnants of native
vegetation, the Permanent Protection Areas (PPA), and the Legal Reserves (LR). Native
vegetation situated within PPA and LR cannot be suppressed.
PPA are portions of the territory considered ecologically important and in which the native
vegetation has to be conserved. The following situations require the establishment of a PPA: (I)
Areas around aquatic environments: a buffer, with variable width, along rivers and around lakes,
lagoons, springs, permanent waterholes, and Veredas (a specific type of wetland); (II) Sites with
specific topographic conditions: slopes inclined more than 45o, edges of plateaus, tops of hills
with more than 100 m and an average slope greater than 25o, and all places with altitude above
1800 m and (III) Specific vegetation types: mangroves and sandbank vegetation. Thus, the
amount of PPAs within a rural property will vary depending on its geographic location and the
context of local geomorphology.
The LR corresponds to a mandatory percentage of each property where native vegetation must be
protected, but where sustainable use is allowed. In Amazonia the percentage is 20% (for
grasslands), 35% (for savannas) or 80% (for forests), while it is 20% elsewhere in the country.
However, the requirement of LR in NFE is relatively recent. Until the year 1989, the former
Forest Code included explicitly only forests in the concept of LR.
A novel requirement in the Native Vegetation Law is that if the property has additional native
vegetation outside PPA and LR, the suppression of this surplus depends on authorization issued
by the state environmental authority. On the other hand, if there is a deficit of native vegetation
for the establishment of PPA and LR, it must be restored (at the expense of the property owner),
but several exceptions exist. While this goes for all types of ecosystem, no criteria have been
established so far for granting (or not) right of suppression of natural vegetation in NFE in any of
the biomes. De facto, this requirement is still not enforced in NFE.
The recent update of the Native Vegetation Law was surrounded by controversy (e.g. Metzger et
al. 2010). Several exceptions were included and more flexible criteria adopted, which resulted in
a lower degree of protection (see Soares-Filho et al. (2014) for a detailed analysis). In addition,
an amnesty was granted to all illegal native vegetation suppression that occurred prior to July 22,
2008, but was conditioned to a commitment to recover or offset the converted area. By the
concept of Rural Consolidated Areas, agricultural use in PPA prior to July 22, 2008, was allowed
to continue as long as a fraction of the original vegetation was recovered. Finally, for those
properties with a deficit of native vegetation in LR, a period of up to 20 years was granted for
their progressive recovery, or the possibility to offset elsewhere.
On the other hand, the new legislation also provided a positive valuing mechanism for the
surplus of native vegetation in rural properties: The areas of native vegetation outside PPA and
LR may be computed for issuance of Environmental Reserve Quotas, a legal title that can be sold
to offset LR deficit in other rural properties in the same biome.
Regardless of the greater flexibility of the new legislation, which has been criticized, it does not
discriminate forest ecosystems at the expense of NFE. In consequence, the contribution of the
new Native Vegetation Code to the conservation of NFE in Brazil can be remarkable. However,
there are still limitations that must be tackled for the enforcement of the legislation that
previously had focused much more on the conservation of forest.
Appendix S2 How much of non-forest ecosystems (NFE) can be potentially protected by the
different legal mechanisms?
To estimate the extent of non-forest ecosystems potentially protected by the different legal
mechanisms of the current Brazilian Native Vegetation Law, we combined the modeled spatial
data available in Soares-Filho et al. 2014 with the maps of Brazilian biomes (IBGE 2004a) and
vegetation types (IBGE 2004b).
In their paper ‘Cracking Brazil's Forest Code’, Soares-Filho et al. (2014) evaluated the effects of
the new law (see Appendix S1) on conservation and restoration of native ecosystems in rural
private properties. Using analytical models, they produced a cartographic database with a gridcell resolution of 60 x 60m containing information on the quantity of remnants of native
vegetation and the combined area of Legal Reserves (LR) and Riparian Preservation Areas
(RPA) required by law within each microwatershed. Strictly protected areas and indigenous
lands, as well as urban areas, water bodies, and 30-m buffers along roads and railroads were
excluded from their analyses.
As the recent law adjustments are not yet fully in force and some cartographic data are not
available, they used some generalizations: 12th-order watersheds (Ottobacias) as a proxy for
rural property limits and hypothetical stream widths based on the river order within the drainage
basin to determine buffer-width protection requirements, among others. Furthermore, Hilltop
Preservation Areas (HPAs) were intentionally not included in the calculation of the Permanent
Protection Areas.
To extract information on the total area of native vegetation remnants in each microwatershed
and the area of native vegetation remnants in compliance with RL and RPA requirements, we
used the data made available by Soares-Filho et al. (2014) at http://www.csr.ufmg.br/forestcode.
The files used and the analytical procedures are described below.
All the microwatersheds that make up Brazil´s territory are contained in
"Watersheds_otto_12.tif" (Outputs data section). As the assessment by Soares-Filho et al. (2014)
focuses on rural private properties, all other areas were excluded (as specified in their file
“FC_applicable_and_nonAp_areas.tif”). Each of the selected microwatersheds was assigned to
one of the Brazilian biomes (IBGE 2004a). Those located on the border between biomes were
assigned based on the position of their corresponding centroid.
The remaining areas of native vegetation in each microwatershed (“remnants.tif” in Inputs data
section) had been obtained through a compilation of surveys of remaining native vegetation data
from several sources, containing data for the period 2008 and 2011, depending on biome.
Additionally, the file “Absolute_balance-per_watershed.tif” (Output data section) contains the
“surplus data”, i.e, the balance between the quantity of remnants and the RL + RPA requirements
calculated by the model applied by Soares-Filho et al. (2014). Positive values correspond to the
quantity of remnants outside the RL + RPA areas, whose suppression depends on permission
under the new law. Neutral values (zero) indicate that all the existent remnants are contained in
Permanent Protected Areas and Legal Reserves. Negative values indicate an environmental debt,
which is the area to be restored to ensure law compliance.
Different combinations of the remnants and surplus data allowed producing information on the
area of remnants that are effectively protected as LR and RPA. From the microwatersheds with
positive surplus values, the sum of all area values is equivalent to the quantity of remnants whose
suppression depends on permission under the new law. We calculated the total area of remnants
protected by LR and RPA regime as follows: 1. For microwatersheds with a positive surplus
value: the difference between the remnants’ area and the area of surplus, 2. For microwatersheds
with a neutral value: total remnant area and 3. For microwatersheds with negative surplus values:
total remnant area.
The overlay of the data on native vegetation remnants per microwatershed, by biome, with the
map of distribution of vegetation types (IBGE 2004b) previously classified in forest ecosystems
and non-forest ecosystems (Appendix S3), allowed us to estimate the distribution of remnants
within these categories. For those microwatersheds with the representation of the two vegetation
categories, all the remnants therein were related to the physiognomy that occupied a larger
proportion.
Assigning the vegetation remnants to each one of these categories based on historical data with
coarse spatial resolution certainly is an oversimplification. Nevertheless, in the absence of
updated vegetation cover mapping with finer resolution, these numbers allow a first evaluation of
the potential role of the Native Vegetation Law for the conservation of non-forest ecosystems, as
presented in Table S1.
Table S1 Total estimated area of non-forest (NFE) and forest ecosystems remnants that may be
potentially protected by the different mechanisms defined by the provisions of the Brazilian
Native Vegetation Law
Native vegetation remnants Native vegetation potNative vegetation
analyzed by Soares-Filho et entially under Permanent potentially under land-use
al. (2014) (103 km2)
Protection Areas and Legal conversion authorization
Reserves (103 km2)
mechanism (103 km2)
Forest
Non-forest
Forest
Non-forest
Forest
Non-forest
Biome
ecosystems ecosystems ecosystems ecosystems ecosystems ecosystems
Amazonia
1723.36
348.49
1588.00
294.12
135.35
54.37
Caatinga
21.34
420.34
9.19
175.81
12.15
244.53
Cerrado
114.25
833.33
57.11
492.90
57.15
340.43
Mata Atlântica
122.18
33.39
103.33
20.05
18.86
13.34
Pampa
1.85
59.04
1.60
28.97
0.25
30.07
Pantanal
14.92
108.82
4.42
46.95
10.50
61.86
Total
1997.90
1803.39
1763.65
1058.79
234.25
744.60
Appendix S3 Data basis and methods for Table 1
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Biome area: the delimitation of the Brazilian biomes and their corresponding area (km2)
were obtained from the official map produced by IBGE (2004a).
Original extent of NFE (1500): data regarding the NFE area for each of the Brazilian
biomes were calculated from a reconstitution of the vegetation types at the time of the
discovery of Brazil made by IBGE (2004b). The original typology was reassembled
considering the following classification: Non-forest ecosystems (NFE), including
woodlands, savannas, steppes and pioneer formations (map vegetation types L Campinarana, S - Savana, T - Savana-estépica, E – Estepe and-P - Áreas de Formações
Pioneiras) and Forest Ecosystems (FE), including all types of forests (map vegetation
types A – Floresta Ombrófila Aberta, C – Floresta Estacional Decidual, D – Floresta
Ombrófila Densa, F – Floresta Estacional Semidecidual, M – Floresta Ombrófila Mista)
but also the forested patches within woodlands (Ld -Caatinga da Amazônia) and savannas
(Sd - Cerradão).
Present extent of NFE (2002): updated data on the extent of native non-forest vegetation
in Brazil are scarce and cover only small portions of the territory. Even with the aid of
satellite remote sensors, forests remain the focus of most vegetation mapping. In addition,
several types of NFE are difficult to detect remotely, because the satellite data tend to
confuse the herbaceous native vegetation with pastures of exotic species. An exception
was the mapping of the Brazilian biomes promoted by MMA (2007). This initiative
quantified for the year 2002, the total forest and non-forest coverage for all biomes. It is
likely that the area of NFE was underestimated in some situations, since the difficulties to
discern herbaceous vegetation were not fully resolved for some biomes. Despite this, it is
the best information available and the NFE values shown in Table 1 are based on these
data.
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
Potential area of NFE in Permanent Protection Areas and Legal Reserves and Potential
area of NFE under land-use conversion permission mechanism: calculated based on
Soares-Filho et al. 2014.
HDI and GDP: IBGE (2012)
Plant species richness (including Angiosperms, gymnosperms, bryophytes, ferns and
lycophytes): List of Species of the Brazilian Flora. Rio de Janeiro Botanical Garden.
Available at: http://floradobrasil.jbrj.gov.br/. Access on: 07.08.2015. This is the currently
most comprehensive database of the Brazilian Flora, but we recognize that the richness of
different species groups in different biomes may be underestimated. For example,
Boldrini et al. (submitted) indicate 2,151 plant species only for grassland areas in the
Pampa biome. This number is higher than the total number of species given for the biome
in the Brazilian Flora, even though trees, epiphytes, ferns, species of wetlands, dunes,
forest or other non-grassland habitat are not included. Similarly, ter Steege et al. (2013)
estimate Amazonia to have 16,000 tree species, i.e. more species than currently indicated
for the biome as a whole in the Brazilian Flora. Despite these obvious shortcomings, it is
the most reliable data currently available and we should expect that the degree of
reliability is similar for all biomes. Note that date is for the biome as a whole, not
distinguishing between forest and non-forest ecosystems.
Bird species richness: SAVE Brasil. Available at: http://savebrasil.org.br/wp/biomasbrasileiros/. Note that date is for the biome as a whole, not distinguishing between forest
and non-forest ecosystems.
Appendix S4 Data bases and methods for Figure 1.
Converted area in the different biomes: Data on native vegetation loss of Brazilian biomes for
the period 2002-2009 are based on three different sources. A few years ago, the Remote Sensing
Center of the Instituto Brasileiro do Meio Ambiente e dos Recursos Naturais Renováveis –
IBAMA started to monitor the suppression of native vegetation in the Caatinga, Cerrado,
Atlantic Forest, Pampa and Pantanal biomes. The first evaluation was conducted for the period
2002-2008 and the second one for the period 2008-2009. Data available in IBAMA (2009) and
IBAMA (2010) were used for these five biomes. More recent data are incomplete for all biomes
and consequently were not used. For the Amazon, the monitoring of deforestation is being
carried out by the Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais – INPE since 1988. Annual
deforestation data are available, however the geographical range exceeds the Amazon biome,
including a somewhat larger region called Legal Amazon, and the suppression of non-forest
vegetation is not considered. Because of this, the data for the Amazon biome used in the paper
correspond to a coarse approximation based on the converted areas in 2002 (MMA 2007) added
with the deforestation annual values for the years 2003 to 2009 (INPE 2015). It should be clear
that the final numbers for Amazonia have two weaknesses: the suppression of forest vegetation is
overrated and the non-forest vegetation loss is missing for the 2003-2009 data. Calculation of the
Conservation Risk Index follows Hoekstra et al. (2005).
Protected area in the different biomes: The Brazilian protected areas legislation (Law no
9985/2000) recognizes 12 categories that can be assembled into two large groups, the strictly
protected areas, which allow only the indirect use of natural resources and correspond to IUCN
categories I-III, and the sustainable use areas, that allow the direct use of natural resources and
correspond to IUCN categories IV to VI. To calculate the percentage of protected areas in each
biome, we considered these protected areas but also included indigenous lands. Data on
protected areas were obtained in Fonseca et al. (2010), which reports the percentage of all these
categories by biome in the year 2009. The data on indigenous lands were obtained from the map
of indigenous lands of Brazil (FUNAI 2015). The process for recognizing indigenous land rights
in Brazil has several phases. We considered in the calculation only those indigenous lands
already homologated and regularized, corresponding to the subsequent steps after official
recognition through a Presidential Decree.
Appendix S5 References in the Supporting Information
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I. I. Boldrini et al. (submitted), Checklist of the grassland angiosperms of Rio Grande do
Sul, Brazil. Phytotaxa.
M. Fonseca et al. (2010). O papel das unidades de conservação. Scientific American
Brasil Especial 39: 18-2.
FUNAI - Fundação Nacional do Índio. Mapa das Terras Indígenas do Brasil. Brasília.
Available at: http://www.funai.gov.br/index.php/shape/. Accessed on: 03/04/2015.
J. Hoekstra et al. (2005), Confronting a biome crisis: global disparities of habitat loss and
protection. Ecology Letters 8: 23-29.
IBGE – Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística (2004a). Mapa de Biomas do
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(2009). Centro de Sensoriamento Remoto. Monitoramento do desmatamento nos biomas
brasileiros por satélite: monitoramento dos biomas Caatinga, Cerrado, Mata Atlântica,
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