Three decades of land-use and land-cover change in mountain regions of the Brazilian Atlantic Forest

Mountain regions are key hotspots for biodiversity conservation and for provisioning ecosystem services. Containing fragile ecosystems and home to millions of inhabitants, mountains are also places of great value for tourism, cultural practices and endemic species. In this paper, we developed the first multitemporal land-use and land-cover assessment of mountain regions within the Brazilian Atlantic Forest (BAF), the most endangered Brazilian tropical biome. The study used spatial thematic mapping for 1985, 2001, and 2018 to understand changes in landscape composition, patterns of change in patch metrics of natural vegetation cover, and correlations between human population and natural vegetation. Change detection techniques, landscape metrics and statistical tests (e.g., Kruskal-Wallis) were applied. We found that landscape composition did not change at significant levels over the 34 years (1985-2018), but that intense exchange between natural vegetation and agriculture creates a shifting mosaic steady-state. Additionally, natural vegetation loss was 13-fold lower within mountains than in other areas of the BAF biome, which indicates lower human-induced change in mountain regions. Urban and rural population (number of inhabitants) showed positive correlation with natural vegetation at municipality level indicating higher presence of population in municipalities with large extents of natural vegetation. Analysis demonstrated that the study region was under lower population pressure and urban growth compared to other areas and had kept large extents of natural vegetation within large patches, different to what is observed at biome level. However, telecoupling processes may result in indirect land changes in mountain regions of the BAF biome. Our results indicate that mountains play a key role in conserving the remnants of the BAF.