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1 January 2020 How Changes in Legally Demanded Forest Restoration Impact Ecosystem Services: A Case Study in the Atlantic Forest, Brazil
Victor A. C. Rosário, João C. Guimarães, Ricardo A. G. Viani
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Abstract

The recent change in Brazilian laws reduced the amount of area that is set aside for native vegetation restoration in rural private properties. However, we lack estimates of its impacts on the provisioning of key ecosystem services at local scales. Therefore, in a microwatershed in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest hot spot, we quantified the impact of the change from the Forest Code (1965) to the Native Vegetation Protection Law in Brazil (2012) on future native forest cover, biomass carbon stocks, and soil loss and sedimentation. We analyzed three scenarios: (a) the land use and cover as of 2016, (b) the Forest Code, 1965, and (c) the Native Vegetation Protection Law, 2012. In each scenario, we modeled soil loss and sedimentation (InVEST, Revised Universal Soil Loss Equation) and calculated the carbon stocks. The 2012 law implementation would increase forest cover (15.6%), decrease soil sedimentation (1.12%) and loss (1.13%), and increase carbon stock (5.4%). However, compared to the Forest Code, it would reduce the area for restoration and the potential for native forest cover growth, increase soil loss and sedimentation potential, and limit increases in carbon stocks at the landscape level. In both restoration scenarios, the potential percent increase in forest cover in the microwatershed owing to the laws is higher than the percent decrease in soil loss and sedimentation. These findings have the potential to elucidate the effect of laws on ecosystem services and be useful to those planning the creation, modification, and implementation of laws for forest restoration in private properties.

© The Author(s) 2019 Creative Commons Non Commercial CC BY-NC: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
Victor A. C. Rosário, João C. Guimarães, and Ricardo A. G. Viani "How Changes in Legally Demanded Forest Restoration Impact Ecosystem Services: A Case Study in the Atlantic Forest, Brazil," Tropical Conservation Science 12(1), (1 January 2020). https://doi.org/10.1177/1940082919882885
Received: 23 July 2019; Accepted: 23 September 2019; Published: 1 January 2020
KEYWORDS
Atlantic forest
carbon
ecological restoration
Landscape modeling
revised universal soil loss equation
soil management
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