CAVE RELEVANCE CLASSIFICATION IN BRAZIL: A PROPOSAL FOCUSED ON BATS

Abstract

Underground environments are among the most vulnerable ecosystems on the Earth. The situation is no different in Brazil, where these environments often overlap with areas under strong anthropogenic pressure. Until 2008, Brazilian legislation determined the need for the preservation and integral conservation of natural cavities and their surroundings as part of the national speleological heritage. However, Decrees 6.640/08 and 10.935/22 altered this condition, determining that natural cavities located in areas of interest for the development of enterprises undergo a classification as to their degree of relevance, classifying them as "maximum, high, medium, or low" relevance. At least ten classification attributes directly involve the bat group. Nevertheless, these attributes may not be considered satisfactory from the bat's point of view and need to be reviewed. Therefore, based on international methods used to prioritize caves, a protocol for classifying the relevance of caves in Brazil, with a focus on bats was developed. The final version of the protocol comprises three classes of protection and considers the following attributes: 1) Full Protection, for the presence of endangered species, hot caves, and caves with highly exceptional abundance; 2) Restrictive Protection, for the presence of maternity colonies and new taxa; and 3) Protection based on relevance, for the presence of rare species and species richness. Full protection attributes automatically classify the cave as being of maximum relevance, restrictive protection attributes would be enough to classify the caves as being of high relevance, and relevance-based attributes are evaluated in conjunction with other attributes to classify the cave as being of low, medium, or high relevance. With this proposal, we hope to contribute to the improviment of the process of classifying the relevance of underground natural cavities currently practiced in Brazilian environmental licensing.