ENVIRONMENT ADEQUACY AND SIMULATION OF LEGAL SCENARIOS IN THE MUNICIPALITY OF PORCIUNCULA, RIO DE JANEIRO

Introduction: The changes made to the Brazilian Forestry Legislation, with Law No. 12,651/12,727 (2012), impacted the demarcation and restoration of Permanent Preservation Areas (APP). Objective: The objective of this work was to delimit and evaluate the APP scenarios in the municipality of Porciuncula/RJ, Brazil, inserted in the Atlantic Forest biome, following the variations of the Brazilian forest legislation since the 1965 Forestry Code until nowadays. Methods: All data analysis was performed using RapidEye-REIS satellite scenes from 2014 and 2015, supervised classification of land use and land cover, basin hydrography, digital elevation model and processing in ArcGIS 10.2 software. The scenarios adopted were: I) Law No. 4,771/1965 and CONAMA Resolution No. 303/2002; II) Laws No. 12,651/2012 and No. 12,727/2012; III) Laws No. 12,651/2012 and No. 12,727/2012 and INEA Resolution No. 93/2014. Results: There was a predominance of agricultural and forest areas, adding more than 90% of the municipality, in the mapping with 96% global accuracy and Kappa index of 0.91. As for the evaluation of the scenarios, it was identified that Scenarios II and III impacted the reduction of APPs by 11.42% and 10.19%, demonstrating the impact of changes in accordance with changes in legislation over the years. In contrast, the legislation of the State of Rio de Janeiro provides a greater percentage of the protected area. Conclusion: It is concluded that the current forest legislation has caused loss of protection in important environmental areas and may increase the fragility of the entire ecosystem in the municipality and region.