Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística

Experimental GEO TRADUZIR

About the publication - Terrestrial Natural Regions and Domains of Brazilian Biomes: A proposal of natural regionalization

The political-administrative limits make up the reference framework for the activities related to the Brazilian state structure. However, as they do not capture the essence of distribution patterns of phytodiversity and not incorporate the natural elements of support and composition of ecosystems, they show restrictions for the modeling required by the processes of production, analysis and dissemination of statistics, especially the environmental ones. For this reason, given the great extension and plurality of characteristics of the National Territory, other geographies and spatial delimitations, such as river basins, biomes, ecosystems and ecological regions, for instance, comprise relevant categorizations.

Sensitive to the fact that a territory should be analyzed under several perspectives, scales and dimensions of study, the IBGE provides, in this publication, a proposal for natural regionalization whose units were delimited based on essentially ecological criteria - not matching, therefore, the political-administrative limits already established.

Implemented from the analysis and integration of thematic records on natural resources available in the IBGE´s Environmental Information Database - BDiA, complemented by secondary elements, especially climate ones, also institutional, this regionalization, among other targets, aims at: delimiting the landscapes representing the physical-biotic diversity of the six Brazilian biomes, including the ocean islands, through natural terrestrial units classified as Natural Domains and Natural Regions; and building a spatial base of reference for the production and dissemination of environmental, social, economic and population statistics, based on physical and biotic attributes.

It is still a study of experimental nature for not meeting a complete degree of maturity in terms of methodology, harmonization and coverage. Nevertheless, it is expected that the new recognized terrestrial spatial geographies - 46 Natural Domains and 271 Natural Regions - can not only contemplate the demands of those interested in an increasingly detailed of the representativeness of the ecological diversity of the National Territory, but also give rise to new studies and contributions concerning this theme.

Enclosing a wall map in the 1:5 000 000 scale in PDF format, the publication is available on the IBGE portal, as well as the database in the 1: 250 000 scale in vector format.