FEASIBILITY OF PAYMENTS FOR ECOSYSTEM SERVICES IN CERRADO AREAS IN THE CERRADO-AMAZON TRANSITION
Keywords: carbon stock; vegetation; biomass, savanna, land cover
Although the transition between the Cerrado and Amazon biomes is described as the most extensive ecotonal region between savannah and forest in the world, little is known about the ecosystem services its natural ecosystems provide. Also, it still needs to be discovered how much intense anthropogenic activities and rapid changes in land use coverage have affected these services and transformed this scenario over the last three decades. The present study aims to evaluate the carbon stock of the aerial part of the typically savannah vegetation that occurs in the transition between the Cerrado and Amazon biomes, estimate the financial value of this service, evaluate the change in land use and cover and its impact on the loss services and identify areas with potential for implementing payment for ecosystem services. For this, we use data from remote sensors obtained from a mosaic of Landsat images that make up the MapBiomas collection 6, redesigned on the Google Earth Engine platform to generate a series of manually categorized temporal maps. We estimate the carbon of natural vegetation by applying a high-resolution map (50 meters) covering the entire Brazilian territory, tested and calibrated based on estimated carbon data in 21 plots of 1 hectare and the application of Gross Primary Productivity (GPP). For carbon valuation, we adopted an average price in dollars practised per ton of carbon equivalent (U$/tCO2eq), assigned by the global carbon market, based on the Brazilian Carbon Pricing platform.