The current Forest Code innovated in guidelines related to the protection of native flora. It established specific rule for small farmers, for which the Legal Reserve (RL) can be remedied with the percentage of remnant native vegetation existing in July 2008, if it is less than 20% of the area. In this context fits into this research, which aims to quantify the legal reserves of 76 farms located in the extreme south of Porto Alegre/RS municipality, and characterize them in terms of coverage of native vegetation in accordance with the provisions of the Code Forest 2012. For both GIS techniques were used through the use of thematic maps of vegetation and land, integrated with data from the real estate cadastre in a Geographic Information System. 18 of the 76 properties surveyed have area above 04 Modules Tax (MF), therefore its legal reserve was calculated considering 20% of its area. For other properties, the RL can be reduced to a fraction of native vegetation, it was found that only 15 of them have less than 20% Legal Reserve , in this case ranging from 1.8% to 18.6%. Legal Reserve without native vegetation cover was observed only for stratum which concentrate the properties of larger size. The special rule exempting recovery of vegetation by small farmers only 1.4% of the area that should be allocated to the legal reserve considering the previous rules
legal reserve; forest code; native vegetation; rural property
