Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística

Description

The Municipal Mesh portrays the current status of the Political-Administrative Division (DPA) through the vector representation of the defining lines of the state and municipal borders, used in the collection of the Population Censuses and remaining surveys of the IBGE. Each version of the product is enriched with territorial changes from:

• new legislation;
• court decisions (injunctions and warrants);
• cartographic changes (technical reports from state offices in charge of the political-administrative division, which update the legal descriptive memorials in light of the new geotechnologies).

The territorial changes informed to the IBGE by the State Offices in charge of this subject and/or Legislative Assemblies after April 30 of the current year are incorporated into the Municipal Mesh in the following year, considering the minimum time needed to process this information into the Territorial Base and other IBGE registers.

The representation of the Brazilian borderlines with neighbor countries in the IBGE´s territorial mesh are those provided by the Ministry of Foreign Relations, through the Brazilian Commissions of Border Demarcation responsible for the consolidation, characterization and demarcation of the Brazilian international borders.

The Municipal Mesh of the IBGE is based on legal references. For the concretization of the border design, some documentation is used: official cartographic bases, the latest cartographic inputs and technical reports from the state offices that update the dividing lines based on social and administrative agreements identified in each region.

In case of divergence at any point of this product, the offices in charge should be consulted:

The sate office in charge of the political-administrative division (demands on the municipal border, pipelines, power plants, airports, antennas, petroleum/gas wells, mining and quarrying areas, tax posts or built structures). The state offices in charge of the political-administrative division in the states (demands on State Borders). The Ministry of Foreign Relations - Brazilian Commissions of Border Demarcation (cases involving International Borders)

Lastly, the borderlines have a minimum detailing complying with the scale of 1:250,000 (without generalization or point suppression).

The IBGE advises that the technical documentation - available for all versions of the Municipal Mesh - be read before the use of the product to settle doubts and avoid misuse of information. It is worth highlighting that the scale expansion of the Mesh mischaracterizes and distorts the products. More details are provided in the READ ME file, within each publication.

The files are grouped by state and, as of 2015, also for Brazil. Each folder presents the Municipal Meshes (MU) and the state border (UF) and other files that may vary from one publication to another. They are available in the Shape File (SHP) format that can be read by most of the existing geoprocessing software and geoinformation viewers. All published data are referenced to the Brazilian Geodetic System (currently SIRGAS 2000) and have a Geographic projection.