Florestas urbanas: impactos socioeconômicos da arborização urbana e métodos de quantificação

Abstract

The tree cover plays an important role in improving the environmental and living quality of urban populations, by means of its ecological, economic, aesthetic and recreational functions. These functions affect the thermal comfort, the balance of the hydrological cycle, the mitigation of noise, visual and air pollutions, the breakdown of the artificiality of the urban environment among others benefits. In this context, this thesis aims to characterize the afforestation of urban areas in the cities of the State of Rio Grande do Norte (RN) and to test methods for quantification of green urban areas. We characterized the urban afforestation using metadata from all cities of the RN from the IBGE‘s statistics census and performed correlations and comparisons of the socioeconomic data with the afforestation, such as violence statistics from Secretariat of Security of the state of RN, since several surveys indicate a clear relationship between lower rates of green areas and higher rates of disease, including depression, and violence. For the statistical tests it was necessary to check the behavior of all the data regarding its normality, using the analysis of the principal components, then the data that presented normality was separated and the covariance matrices and factorial analyses were done, all in the R software package (2018). After data analyses, two municipalities were chosen (contraposing high homicide rate per 100,000 inhabitants and low afforestation of public areas versus low homicide rate per 100,000 inhabitants and high afforestation of public areas) in each mesoregion of the state of RN. Also, we compared the geoprocessing of images with the official census afforestation data. In the partial results, a correlation was found for the variables: afforestation of public areas, hospitalizations for diarrhea at the East, Agreste, Central and West Potiguar regions of RN. Moreover, the Central, West and East Potiguar regions were inversely proportional to homicide and afforestation rates of public areas. That is, the greater the afforestation of public areas in in municipalities of these regions, the lower the homicide rates. And the municipalities that had a higher homicide rate and less afforestation of public areas for the Central, West and East Potiguar regions were Currais Novos, Caraúbas and São Gonçalo do Amarante, respectively calling for specific actions.