Effects of Deforestation over the Cerrado Landscape: A Study in the Bahia Frontier

The losses in the Brazilian Cerrado raise the need to understand the border regions between human activities and Cerrado remnants. This work aims to answer the questions: How does the landscape change in a deforestation area in the Brazilian Cerrado, and where do the losses of native Cerrado occur in the landscape context? We chose the Cerrado of Bahia, an area of the agricultural frontier, and used landscape metrics, and land use and land cover data from 2013 and 2020, to quantify the changes in the landscape. We built a typology of landscape patterns to classify and characterize the Cerrado landscapes, based on the landscape metrics, and land use and land cover data from TerraClass Cerrado 2013. From these parameters, a decision tree classifier enabled the classification of the landscape types. Then, we used the yearly deforestation data from PRODES Cerrado to obtain the native cover and the landscape metrics for 2020. The predominant landscape in 2013 was the Intermediate Stage of Fragmentation (32.53%), followed by the Initial Stage of Fragmentation (31.26%), Consolidated Pasture (16.4%), Consolidated Agriculture (9.78%), Mixed Landscapes (5.59%) and Native Cerrado (4.70%). The continuous Cerrado borders on areas in an initial and intermediate stage of fragmentation, putting pressure on the native area. The losses in native cover do not occur in consolidated landscapes or inside the continuous Cerrado. Instead, there is a process of vegetation conversion over the landscapes in the initial and intermediate stages of fragmentation, and landscapes where the matrix is heterogeneous. These factors signal the need to preserve the contiguous fragments of Cerrado.