Evaluation of landscape urbanity in Americana, são paulo, Brazil
International Journal of Development Research
Evaluation of landscape urbanity in Americana, são paulo, Brazil
Received 09th July, 2017; Received in revised form 24th August, 2017; Accepted 27th September, 2017; Published online 10th October, 2017
Copyright ©2017, Diego Peruchi Trevisan and Luiz Eduardo Moschini. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
The constant transformation of space comes as a result of established socio-environmental, economic and cultural relations. In order to understand the relationships between the patterns and processes in the landscape, considering or not the hierarchical organization, the development of methods for the quantification of their structure has been used. This study focuses on analyzing temporal dynamics of landscape and land cover in Americana (SP Brazil in 1994, 2008 and 2016) aiming to diagnose the landscape urbanity through the application of The Urbanity Index (UI). Geographic Information Systems (GIS) were used to map the use and land cover and to visualize the UI. The UIresults evidenced anincrease of the landscape urbanization over time, mainly due to the decrease of forestry in the municipality. The growth of anthropogenic activities and the loss of natural areas can compromise the biodiversity present in Americana, implying the loss of environmental functions and consequently the benefits they provide.
