The concept of environmental services is defined as interactions and natural processes that satisfy
and sustain the human life, being of hydrological character those that interfere in the hydrical
quality supply. In several countries of the world and especially in Latin America and Caribbean,
the conception of Payments for Hydrological Environmental Services (PES) have been discussed
and even already being put in practice. Theese approaches try to establish pacts among the
interests of located proprietors in amount (providers) and in down-stream (beneficiaries) in
watersheds. The essence of this process is the maintenance of the hidrical resources perenniality.
In the São João Watershed, one of the largest movements of Heritage Private Natural Reserve
(RPPN) creation exists in Brazil, located in amount of the water capture to Costa do Sol of Rio de
Janeiro. That protection, that is voluntary and perpetual, however, hasn’t been recognized
economically. In this study a theoretical and indirect analysis is developed on the hydrological
vocation of those conservation units, since specified information doesn’t exist on that, as subsidy
instrument to possible programs of payments for hydrological environmental services in the
watershed. To attend that, analyses to the offer of physical, biological environmental and
anthropic attributes were made in macro-scale (area and watershed as a whole), identifying
homogeneous areas in environmental services performance (type-areas), and in micro-scale
(RPPN), in this case gruping the UC's through environmental attributes of the catchment that
protect, identifying the similarity among the same ones in the point of view of hydrological
answers units, susceptible to be chosen in possible environmental services monitoring. In this
case, such catchments were characterized through 13 variables. Besides that, were created four
indexes that are related to RPPN, to the catchments protected for the same ones and to São João
Watershed as a whole, in the attempt to systematize and synthesize informations that suggest the
hydrological vocation of those UC's, as practical subsidy to the managers of PES in Atlantic
Forest Watersheds. In all the stages of the study, the software ArcView 3.2a was used. In the São
João Watershed, seven type-areas different about hydrological
environmental services
performance were identified, described and delimitated. It was identifyied that catchments
protected by RPPN can be grupped in 3 hydrological answers units and that, the results of their
environmental services monitoring can be extrapolated for the others. The results of the four
criated indexes point that RPPN posses different hydrological vocation. The used conception,
that compiles, systematizes and synthesizes the environmental and anthropical informations in
macro and micro-scale, conforms as a potential theoretical mark for payments for environmental
services of practice application for their managers, can still be used by watershed committees in
executive actions and direct and indirectly companies beneficiaries of public and private
conservation units to amount, as it happens in São João Watershed.
