Determination of priority areas for the re-establishment of forest cover, based on the use of geotechnologies

The determination of priority areas for the re-establishment of forest cover in watersheds is directly associated to the probability of effective success of restoration processes. However, considering the complexity of the analysis and the large amount of spatial data necessary to accomplish that purpose, state of the art technological tools capable of processing multi-criteria analysis to support decision making are necessary. Thus, the current work developed for an area of 476 km2 corresponding to the Una river watershed in the municipal district of Taubaté, SP, used a multi-criteria analysis based on the continuous classification and on Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) paired comparisons techniques, available in the complete GIS package named SPRING (Georeferenced Information Processing System) for generating a map of priority areas for the re-establishment of forest cover in that watershed. Results revealed a large area (26.6% of the entire watershed) falling in the “Extreme Priority” class for forest cover re-establishment, what indicates the urgent need of environmental recovery of this basin considering that it is used for Taubaté city water supply. Results from this research support the decision making for resource optimization applied to priority areas in an operational way.