Interesse público em áreas protegidas brasileiras através de dados digitais

Abstract

Protected areas (PAs) plays a fundamental strategic role for the biodiversity conservation on Earth. Despite this, there is evidence these areas are seen as a constraint do economic development, being subject to political decisions that leave them vulnerable to public and private development initiatives. Ensuring PAs public support is a crucial factor in preventing actions aimed at downgrading, downsizing or degazettement these áreas (PADDD events). It is not easy to directly measure the factors leading a particular PA to obtain public support. However, this support is probably related to the public interest and awareness of these areas. This thesis explored a novel digital metric based on Wikipedia page views for analyzing public interest in protected areas and their political vulnerability to development pressures. The national and international interest was assessed by generating separate metrics for Portuguese and other languages. The results showed that the national and international public interest is related to older and larger PAs, mainly National Parks. These results are likely to reflect the history of establishing the PAs, which began in great scenic beauty areas and, currently, occur in more disputed and less aesthetically attractive areas. Many PAs had no pages on Wikipedia. Many of PAs that had pages were rarely accessed by the public. Low-level public interest in these areas could leave them particularly vulnerable to development pressures. The results showed many politically vulnerable PAs, which are those with high-pressure values and low-level public interest. Digital metrics of public interest can be generated simply and inexpensively than the application of questionnaires and other survey methods. These metrics can also be quickly implemented into the existing assessment systems for protected areas. Thus, it is recommended that those involved in the management of protected areas implement these metrics to monitor the public interest and that politically vulnerable PA managers invest in measures to gain public interest and ensure a support base in the future.