Relacionando serviços ecossistêmicos culturais e práticas geradoras de valor em áreas protegidas

Abstract

Protected areas are recognized as essential for nature conservation in the 21st century. Despite the great importance of these areas in Brazil, their long-term existence has been threatened by sectors of society that see them as opportunity costs compared to other land uses. Thus, to ensure their long-term existence, it is necessary that we demonstrate all forms of value they generate, in addition to their obvious value for biodiversity conservation. Here, we use both traditional and innovative approaches to quantify the provision of Cultural Ecosystem (Dis)Services and Value Generating Practices, respectively, by Brazilian protected areas. In chapter 1 of this thesis, we used face-to-face questionnaires to identify differences in the perception of cultural services and disservices among residents inside and outside protected areas in the Amazon, in addition to exploring socioeconomic factors associated with these differences. It was observed that residents of protected areas mentioned more social recreation and cultural heritage when compared to residents outside these areas. In addition, we observed that communities within protected areas have higher education and gender equity. We argue that such differences must be associated with the involvement of these communities with the Arapaima management project, which has been pointed out as responsible for countless other social and ecological benefits. In chapter 2, it was possible to identify which are the most relevant value-generating practices for domestic and international visitors in coastal protected areas. As expected, it was observed that social recreation is more relevant for international visitors while natural resource use is more important for domestic visitors. In general, all categories of value-creating practices were more prominent in national parks, when compared to state or municipal parks. Finally, we conclude that our Amazonian results can serve as an important baseline for assessments of ecosystem services and disservices in the future. We also recommend the creation of integrated databases that can be quickly analyzed together to help decision-making in the protected areas of this iconic biome. Also, the use of the cultural salience index based on the number of internet pages containing key terms proved to be adequate for the evaluation of value-generating practices in protected areas. We hope that the use of this approach can be replicated for assessing the importance of assets in protected areas, such as iconic/threatened species and tourist attractions. In the future, it is expected that the greater processing capacity of computers and the development of new tools to collect and analyze data from the internet will enable the generation of information that will help decision-making in protected areas in real time.