Atlas da paisagem do município de Segredo, Rio Grande do Sul

Abstract

Many different municipalities in Brazil face problems resulting from the lack of planning and documents in general about the environment where people live and work. Segredo, in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, is a municipality with just over seven thousand inhabitants, whose population faces several social, cultural, economic, and environmental issues in different regions of the territory. One possible manner to gather informative resources and assist in planning the territory is through a landscape atlas, observing risks, potentials, deficiencies, and opportunities that occur in the different parts of the territory. These documents are produced by gathering information both about the natural environment (such as the environment and cartography) and about the anthropic environment (as in historical and cultural rescues), being generally directed to entire regions, specific to countries or states. Applying this concept, which is usually used for larger territories and produced by large teams, to a municipality of just over 240 square kilometers requires several adaptations and reviews of the contents and methods present in several of the atlases already produced. A search has been conducted in different databases for the necessary layers, together with the review and historical rescue (also translated into cartographic language), to obtain landscape units that characterize the territory of Segredo through geography, economy, and cultural aspects. The data were separated according to the historical-cultural, economic, and physical-geographical approaches and crossed in software to obtain previous and automated data on where the landscape units could be established. With fieldwork, the document could be validated for defining five landscape units in the territory of Segredo, namely: Vale do Jaquirana landscape unit; Tamanduá landscape unit; Alto da Serra Norte landscape unit; Alto da Serra da Serra Sul landscape unit; and Sede landscape unit. Each unit, analyzed based on the particularities or characteristics they share, was described through its strengths and weaknesses, and guidelines for their development were pointed out. Finally, through methodological processes adapted to the reality of the territory, resources were obtained for the production of an atlas: a document that, when delivered to the public, could influence notes for municipal development and the propagation of landscape studies with an interdisciplinary contribution to the national scene.