Federal Conservation Units of Brazil's Coastal-Marine System

The limits of the six biomes of the Brazilian territory (i.g. Amazon, Atlantic Forest, Cerrado, Caatinga, Pampa and Pantanal) were recently revised (IBGE, 2019), and a new territorial section of the ocean-continent interface, called the Marine Coastal System (CMS) was presented. However, despite being a central theme for conservation planning, the spatial relationship between the federal conservation units of Brazil (FCU) and the CMS remained without a conclusive answer. In this paper - Protected areas of Brazil's Coastal-Marine System: Spatial modelling and conservation planning on biomes – ocean interface (Journal of Aquaculture & Marine Biology) - we investigate the complex biome-ocean interface by developing spatial modelling encompassed a broad biogeographic context. The primary work objective is to determine the spatial relationship between the CMS and the FCU, through the application of a set of topological and algebraic rules to then map the spatial distribution of the FCU in the 5 biomes and in the 4 geographical regions overlapping the CMS. The study area encompassed all the latitudinal and longitudinal variation of the CMS and related its geological, geomorphological and vegetation types with these descriptors that make up each FCU. The current dataset is presented in shapefile format with metadata description.