Evaluation of the recovery potential of modified areas in Permanent Protection Areas of watercourses in the municipality of Rio Branco, Acre

In the last decades, the state of Acre has been showing increasing deforestation, concentrated mainly on the outskirts of its capital, Rio Branco. The present study was aimed at assessing the resilience level of water courses in Permanent Protection Areas (PPA) located in the city of Rio Branco. Were used orbital images from the Landsat 5 TM sensor for the mapping of soil utilization in the year of 2009. Was carried out the superposition of this map with the soil type map, as well as with the distance from seed sources, resulting in a final map of resilience level. Although protected by law, Rio Branco has about 17% of their PPAs watercourses altered. From the aspects evaluated in this study to determine the resilience, the soil type was the most limiting factor, while the distance of the sources of seeds was the most potentiating. The methodology allowed us to estimate the percentage of altered areas in the PPAs that are more resilient, thus allowing the implementation of the more appropriate and less expensive recovery programs for each area.