Monitoramento de biodiversidade em múltiplas escalas: o caso do Parque Nacional da Serra dos Órgãos

Abstract

Understanding nature's conservation status is the first step in guiding measures for its protection. Biodiversity monitoring is a tool to measure this state and the achievement of conservation goals. This thesis addresses in situ monitoring of biodiversity, in which the parameters of interest are measured in the field. This thesis aims to investigate the in situ monitoring of biodiversity carried out as a public environmental management tool at multiple scales, from the national to the local scale, using the Serra dos Órgãos National Park (PARNASO) as an example. On a national scale, six in situ biodiversity monitoring initiatives managed by the executing agencies of the National Environmental Policy (PNMA), IBAMA and ICMBio, were analyzed regarding the types of variables and taxa monitored, data availability and potential use of data in public policy. The National Biodiversity Monitoring Program (Programa Monitora), executed by ICMBio, was described in more detail, demonstrating how it stimulates social participation and influences decisions and management instruments. It was observed that, despite the relationship between the evaluated programs and public policies, the in situ monitoring initiatives are relatively recent, isolated, some still in the structuring phase and not connected to other elements foreseen in the PNMA. There is still unexplored potential for using the data and information generated to feed official reports and statistics, both on a national scale, such as the National Environmental Information System, and internationally, such as essential biodiversity variables data sets and periodic reports on the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals. On a local scale, the possibility of using the occupancy of medium and large-sized terrestrial mammals as an indicator in the biodiversity monitoring in PARNASO was investigated, following the advanced protocol for monitoring birds and mammals of the Programa Monitora, with data collected by camera traps and analyzed using occupancy models. The results indicate that this method would be sufficient to generate reliable estimates of occupancy for eight mammalian taxa in PARNASO, however, considering the initial occupancies and detection and probabilities, it may be necessary to increase the sampling effort in order to guarantee greater accuracy of the estimates. The results point to the importance of considering the effect of logistical aspects, such as sampling effort and the camera trap model, on species’ detection probabilities when designing occupancy models. The results corroborate the assumption of local extinction of four species of large mammals and indicate concern about the local status of one species, indicating that PARNASO may be undergoing a process of defaunation, as well as a large part of the Atlantic Forest. It is important to understand how mammals use space on the scale of the Mosaic of Protected Areas of the Central Fluminense Atlantic Forest (MCF), what are the barriers to their natural dispersal and what can be done to mitigate those. Therefore, the thesis demonstrated how data generated by monitoring mammals in PARNASO can inform conservation actions at multiple scales.