Forest Management Transparency Report – State of Pará (2009 – 2010)

In this bulletin, we assess the logging situation in the State of Pará between the years 2009 and 2010.
Monteiro, A., Conrado, D., Cardoso, D., Veríssimo, A. & Souza Jr., C. 2011.
In this bulletin Transparency in Forest Management in Pará we assess the logging situation in the State.
To do this, we first verified the regularity or consistency of the information on management plans in the Timber Harvesting Authorizations (Autorizações de Exploração Florestal – Autef) and authorized credits from logging issued by the State Secretariat for the Environment in Pará (Sema), from August, 2009 to July, 2010. We found that in 2010 the great majority (90%) of Autef plans were legally compliant, while 10% had inconsistencies, such as: i) area authorized larger than area for management; ii) area authorized in already degraded or deforested area; iii) area authorized in already logged area iv) timber credit commercialized greater than authorized.
Our assessment also involved estimating the areas logged both legally (authorized) and illegally (not authorized) from August, 2009 to July, 2010, using NDFI images derived from Landsat images. The results reveal that of the 120,512 hectares of forests logged in the period, the majority (65% or 78,941 hectares) were authorized by Sema as opposed to 35% or 41,571 hectares authorized. In terms of illegal logging, the great majority (84%) occurred in areas that were private, vacant or disputed;
another 13% in land reform settlements; and only 3% in Protected Areas. For the two periods we observed a 16% reduction in illegal logging (15,444 hectares) and a positive increase of 33% (10,400 hectares) in legal logging.
Finally, we evaluated the quality of forest management performance in the State from August, 2008 to July, 2009 and August, 2009 to July, 2010 using NDFI images. We observed that timber harvesting with forest management increased between the period; while there we verified 24,730 hectares with good quality, 16,915 hectares with intermediate quality and 12,021 with low quality logging.
For a general assessment of timber harvesting status in the State, we utilized information from Sema control systems: Simlam (Integrated System for Licensing and Environmental Monitoring – Sistema Integrado de Licenciamento e Monitoramento Ambiental) and Sisflora (System for Marketing and Transportation of Forest Products – Sistema de Comercialização e Transporte de Produtos Florestais)-, which were overlapped with information generated by Simex (System for Monitoring Timber Harvesting – Sistema de Monitoramento da Exploração Madeireira), developed by Imazon (Box 1).
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