Gramado expansion plan

Context

Gramado, a major tourism hub in the Serra Gaúcha neighboring Canela, was planning a significant urban expansion northward: the traditional zone was reaching saturation, and the municipality saw the northern plateau as the next frontier for resorts and tourism infrastructure.

The expansion area sits on a plateau near a conservation unit (Parque dos Pinheiros) and a lake of scenic and recreational value already showing water quality degradation. The question was how to define protection boundaries that could coexist with development. I was brought in through the NTU at UFRGS for the environmental characterization, following a similar approach to the Canela work.

Approach

The municipality provided an unusually detailed high-resolution DEM (~1 m) from a local survey, which I used to map the drainage network and identify potential saturation and wetland formation, critical on a flat plateau, where water accumulation isn’t obvious from visual inspection alone.

The central piece was proposing a hydrologically-grounded buffer zone that follows catchment boundaries instead of an arbitrary distance from the park boundary, protecting the full drainage area feeding the lake regardless of administrative perimeter, since whatever affects the catchment affects the lake. Since the lake already showed sewage contamination despite its green surroundings, protecting only the shoreline wouldn’t solve the problem.

This buffer captured parts of both existing and proposed urban zones, so restrictions applied across administrative boundaries. This makes it a stronger framework than a simple distance ring, and it supported the city’s interest in pairing expansion with compensation and protection strategies.

I also ran the standard land use assessment (MapBiomas + OpenStreetMap, as in Canela) and topographic analysis, delivered as GeoPackages and TIFF rasters for the NTU team’s broader planning products.

Outcomes

The deliverables were technical reports produced as an independent consultant for the NTU team: intermediate layers for the broader expansion plan, designed, as with Canela, for direct ingestion into their official planning products.

Resources:

• Environmental assessment report, Gramado expansion (report link pending)

Contracted through Fundação Luiz Englert (UFRGS)