LANDSCAPE STRUCTURE IN THE LANDS OF THE UPPER COURSE OF THE BANABUIÚ RIVER, CEARÁ STATE, BRAZIL

The land use and the anthropic occupation of lands are activities directly related to the degradation process of the original vegetation cover because the natural vegetation must be removed so that these activities may take place, which changes the landscape as a whole. In the central hinterland of Ceará State, it is clear that the agriculture and livestock grazing practices are the main factors responsible for the vegetation fragmentation process and landscape changes. Land use and land cover mapping are widely used in the evaluation of natural landscape fragmentation, applying on them, the metrics which quantify the structure of a landscape. Thus, those metrics were used on the land use and land cover mapping of a polygon located in the central hinterland of the Ceará State in order to determine the structure of the landscape and infer how much of its natural vegetation is degraded. It should be noticed, by the land use and land cover mapping, that the landscape is divided into eight classes, namely: Urban Area, Agriculture, Water Body, Pasture, Exposed Soil, Riparian Vegetation, Open Shrub Caatinga and Dense Shrub Caatinga , and that the region has a significant percentage of natural cover (65%), but It is very fragmented in ecologically unstable patches that have small areas and large perimeters (which gives them a lot of reentrants), vulnerable to edge effects and susceptible to disappear in a very short time.