Geotechnologies applied to analysis of the rural environmental cadastre

[Display omitted] •We examined the rural environmental cadastre with the help of geotechnology.•We analyzed federal legislation relevant to rural environmental cadastre.•The methodology serves for the analysis rural environmental cadastre.•The proposed methodology can be adapted to areas of other countries. Geotechnologies have been widely employed in environmental monitoring and process control over the Brazilian territory. To identify perpetrators of environmental violations and promote environmental regularization of private rural properties, the government established a national registration requirement, known as Cadastro Ambiental Rural – CAR (Rural Environmental Cadastre). It is an electronic registration platform, where owners declare the property area and its environmental aspects. This work consisted of analyzing and discussing CAR module tools provided by the Brazilian Federal Government, which were adopted by Rio de Janeiro State, with the equivalent registration modules from Minas Gerais and São Paulo States. The results indicate that while the federal platform has a simple and intuitive interface, prior knowledge of current legislation is essential. Except for São Paulo State platform, the others allow inserting data obtained by different approaches, not establishing a standard mapping scale or spatial resolution. The images provided by Federal Government platform do not fully support visual identification of the required information, especially on small properties, what makes alternative data and software necessary. Although not current, only São Paulo platform provides good quality images to support the identification of features required by CAR. The proposed methodology can be adapted other country areas.