UC Santa Barbara

Regional maps featuring the fine-scale heterogeneity of neotropical savannas are necessary for delineating species habitats and for supporting conservation and ecological analyses. The Brazilian neotropical savanna is the most floristically diverse savanna in the world and is amongst the top 36 global priorities for conservation. In this dissertation, I used a suite of fine-scale geospatial analyses and remote sensing imagery in support of improving biodiversity conservation efforts in Cerrado private lands. In Chapter 2, I developed a systematic framework using Geographic Object-Based Image Analysis (GEOBIA) that incorporated spectral and spatial features in a novel environmental spatial ruleset developed to map a wide range of Cerrado vegetation structural types at 5-m resolution. This framework mapped 13 land cover categories effectively, of which 11 were physiognomic types. Map accuracy was 87.6%. The results show that high spatial resolution imagery is appropriate for discriminating Cerrado land cover classes and the GEOBIA framework is essential for refining land cover categories to ecological classes (physiognomic types). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first map to feature a wide range of detailed physiognomic types with high map accuracy at high spatial resolution. In Chapter 3, I developed a fine-scale spatially explicit gap analysis to estimate possible protection status of physiognomic types and important habitats for endangered and endemic avifauna from areas under land use regulation (i.e. Brazil's Forest Code). I also assessed the potential compliance status of rural properties with land use regulation by land property size. Moreover, I proposed a quantitative approach to support current policy implementation and improve their guidelines. The results indicate that instruments of policy implementation such as Legal Reserves and Areas of Permanent Preservation are essential for ensuring protection of a wide diversity of physiognomic types and essential habitats for endemic and endangered species. I demonstrated that allocation for mandatory set asides can be optimized to maximize biodiversity by considering the representativeness of unprotected physiognomic types. Moreover, the results suggest that land property size might be a reliable indicator to target illegal land clearing within areas under current policy. Thus, efforts to enforce and monitor policy compliance can be improved by targeting land property size. In Chapter 4, I investigated alternative conservation priority-setting schemes to allocate privately protected areas in a Cerrado commodity-driven agricultural landscape, aiming to improve habitat protection and increase landscape connectivity between protected areas. The results suggest that unprotected vegetation in Cerrado private lands is critical to maintaining regional structural connectivity between large protected areas such as national parks and ecological stations. I found that additional conservation set-asides are important for complementing habitat representation and increasing habitat protection and landscape connectivity beyond efforts implemented by current policies. Thus, conservation in private lands represents an opportunity to reconcile conservation and agricultural production.