VEGETATION COVER IN THE CITY CENTER OF THE BRAZILIAN CAPITALS

Abstract

Several Brazilian state capitals have an environmental title: “the greenest capital”, “most sustainable capital” or “most wooded capital” of Brazil or of the world. Few of these titles, however, were preceded by studies that explained the conceptualization and methodology used to reach such a result. To address this gap, this study aimed to establish a ranking between Brazilian state and district capitals based on vegetation cover. In order to do that, we used satellite images of the Google Earth software and edited the vegetation cover polygons of all 27 Brazilian capitals in ArcGIS 10.2.2 software. Due to the time determined for the research, we decided to map only the central areas of the capitals, within a radius of 500m around some landmarks commonly located in the center of cities, such as Mother Church, City Hall and the zero milestone marker. Completed the mapping stage and established the ranking, Brasília (DF) reached the first position, with 31,83% of vegetation cover in the mapped area, and Aracaju (SE) was the last one, with 6,38% of vegetation cover in its central area. However, our findings showed that this could not be considered as a fair ranking due to the difficulty of locating the capital center with precision. Besides, there was a lot of divergence in the satellite images available for each city, as they presented very different dates, resolutions and image quality incompatible with the intended comparison. In addition, state and district capitals have very different physical, historical and socioeconomic conditions, which also makes the comparison among them unfair.