Geoenvironmental Mapping for the Delimitation of Regulated Areas for Use and Occupation

The pressure constantly increases for the use and occupation of unexplored areas, concomitantly degrading natural resources. On the other hand, national, state, and municipal laws have arisen to regulate and preserve sites for environmental sustainability, such as Areas of Permanent Preservation (APP) and Legal Reserves. Nevertheless, the significant territorial extension and the multiple legislation make it difficult to define these areas. A relevant instrument to solve this issue is the geoenvironmental mapping of the territory. This work sought to delimit effectively regulated areas for use and occupation based on the geoenvironmental mapping of a section of the municipality of Ubajara, Ceará. Therefore, it was necessary to analyze the hypsometry, slope, water resource, and soil and delimit the APP and Conservation Units. The mapping revealed 15.67% of APP and 37.44% of use and occupation areas, being 46.88% effectively regulated for the use and occupation of the soil with diverse economic activities – such as agricultural, forestry, and pastoral-contemplated in the Ubajara master plan.

sustainable economic use of the natural resources of the rural property, assisting the conservation and rehabilitation of ecological processes, and promoting biodiversity, as well as the shelter and protection of wild fauna and native flora (BRASIL, 2012).
Besides being in the Forest Code, at the municipal level, the occupation and use of soil are in the municipal master plans through ecological-economic zoning, which are instruments that guide it within the territory (BRASIL, 2001).
Although municipal zoning defines urban, low-occupation residential, and rural zones to regulate the use and occupation of the soil, such data are usually on scales hard to interpret and access. Besides, the territorial extension and multiple laws hamper the definition of areas regulated for the use and occupation by entrepreneurs who seek to develop economic activities-agricultural, forestry, and pastoral-and those that contemplate the exploitation of natural resources, which contributes to non-compliance with laws and the occurrence of environmental impacts.
In this context, and considering the need to enforce environmental legislation at the federal, state, and municipal levels, the geoenvironmental mapping of the territory becomes a relevant tool because it enables the integration of information on the physical environment (Silva & Dantas, 2022). It favors the framing of mapped territories according to guidelines in environmental legislation, which provides compliance with the law and proper use and occupation of soils.
Therefore, the work presents the geoenvironmental mapping of an area in Ubajara, Ceará, delimiting zones of use and occupation. In addition, it promotes knowledge about Brazilian environmental legislation.

Material and Method
The study area is in Ubajara, northwestern Ceará, on the border with the Piauí, in a region known as Ibiapaba Plateau or Ibiapaba Mountains. The municipality is the seat of a Conservation Unit (CU), a denomination under Law No. 9985 of July 18, 2000, given by the Sistema Nacional de Unidades de Conservação da Natureza (National System for Nature Conservation, SNUC) to natural areas subject to the protection that have unique characteristics. It includes zones with biodiversity and ecological representativeness in specific territories (SNUC, 2000).
The delimitation of the study area took place in a perimeter with a radius of 3 km, starting from the PARNA cave, one of the main tourist attractions of the park located at coordinates 3°49'42.13" lat. S and 40°54'22.50" long. W ( Figure 1). horizontal plane determined by the plain or adjacent water mirror or, on undulating reliefs, by the quota of the saddle point closest to the elevation.
The APP mapping used automated methods applied to Digital Elevation Models (DEM) from Alos Palsar, with a spatial resolution of 12.5 m, which underwent pre-treatment and filling of the raster depressions.
The springs delimitation happened from the drainage layer using the adherence tools to mark a point in all the initial areas of the drainage network, which resulted in the APP of springs.
The APP of the watercourses had bases on the drainage layers using a vector tool that generated a buffer following the Forestry Code parameters mentioned above. It used a 30-meters distance buffer because the study area has waterways up to 10 meters wide. After the buffer creation, it dissolved the file and created a shapefile layer named APP of watercourses.
The DEM assisted the acquisition of the APP of hilltops. Thus, it was necessary to remove the dark depression named Hydrologically Consistency of Elevation Digital Model (HCDEM) using the Fill Sinks tool from Saga, an extension within Qgis. The creation of an inverse DEM helped to define elevation domains and generate dividers by demarcating the flow lines that, in the non-inverted relief, represent the saddle points.
Subsequently, it turned the file from raster to vector. Naming the layer as the base boundary, it assigned slopes above 45° and amplitude above 100 meters. The saddle points, zonal statistics, and field calculator tools provided the creation of a column with the value of the upper third, and, after that, the file became a raster again.
To check the hilltop APP, the (DN = 1) formula applied in the field calculator provided the hilltop features.
For the definitions of the slope APP, the use of the previous process described above only considered values greater than 45°.

Result and Discussion
The study area has 2,824.53 hectares-42.55% of it (1,201.83 ha) is in the Conservation Unit of the National Park of Ubajara. The Conservation Units around the country maintain natural spaces and conservation of local biodiversity (Hassler, 2005).
The hypsometry, slope, and soil maps are in Figure 2. The altitude evaluation (Figure 2A) shows variations between 230 m and 900 m, with significant representativeness between 750 m and 900 m, which occupy about 54.4% of the area and are distributed mainly in the plateau area. Lower altitudes (between 230 m and 620 m) are usual in the escape area, which follows in the direction of the hinterland surface, with the most significant among these, the altitudes in the 230 m and 360 m range, which represent about 18.02 % of the total area ( Figure 2A).
The high altitudes are due to the local geological nature, characterized as a plateau resulting from high crystalline and sedimentary residual reliefs (Araujo & Martins, 1999;Sampaio, 1995 The summary of the regulated areas is in Figures 3B and 3C. Figure 3B shows areas with partial regulation for use and occupation, such as agriculture, forestry, pasture, tourism, and scientific and environmental education activities, totalizing 2,381.9 ha or 84.33% of the study area. The areas include the Ubajara National Park, which is under ICMbio jurisdiction. As for the nature of use and occupation, the areas in the Ubajara National Park (1,057.63 ha or 37.44%) are for touristic, scientific, and environmental purposes since the PARNA belongs to a protective group. The preservation goal does not allow the use of its resources but only actions that do not involve consumption, collection, or damage (BRASIL, 2000). In these areas, the development of any of the activities mentioned depends on the ICMbio authorization and other competent environmental licensing agencies. Figure 3C contemplates the areas eligible for use and occupation that are not in the Ubajara National Park. Therefore, the regulation is due to various economic activities, including agriculture, forestry, and cattle ranching, and is subject to environmental licensing by competent licensing agencies. These represent a total of 46.88% of the total area assessed, or 1,324.27 ha.

Conclusions
The mapping revealed that 46.88% out of the 2,824.53 ha of the study area has regulations for use and occupation, including agricultural, forestry, and pastoral activities. In addition, 37.44% are only to research, tourism, and environmental education activities with authorization from ICMbio. The remaining zones-forbidden for use and occupation-are APP for watercourses, springs, slopes, and hilltops.
Geosystemic knowledge obtained through the integrated analysis of the geographic elements in geoenvironmental maps of this study enables the classification and selection of regulated areas for use and occupation. Besides, it supports the elaboration of legislation and municipal ecological-economic zoning, which contributes to sustainable occupancy.
The importance of geoenvironmental mapping is significant for small areas. Therefore, and due to the wide scale, this study is not appropriate to be a single reference when elaborating projects for use and occupation in the area of the clipping in question.