What a Legal Reserve is — and how one hectare of it becomes traceable

Every rural property in Brazil is required by law to keep a share of its native vegetation standing. That share is called the Legal Reserve (Reserva Legal), and it is the forest behind every FRU on this platform. This article explains where the obligation comes from, why keeping the forest costs money, and how the Neutraza turns one hectare of it into something a person can point to.

The law behind the forest

The rule is written in the Forest Code (Federal Law 12,651 of 2012). It sets a minimum percentage of each rural property that must remain covered by native vegetation:

• 80% for properties in forest areas of the Legal Amazon;
• 35% for properties in the cerrado (savanna) areas of the Legal Amazon;
• 20% in the rest of the country.

The reserve is declared in the CAR (Cadastro Ambiental Rural, the Rural Environmental Registry), a public database where each property draws the polygon of its Legal Reserve. The landowner may use the reserve in a sustainable way, but may not clear it. Keeping it standing is an obligation that stays with the land, not with the owner.

Why preservation needs an incentive

A Legal Reserve is land that produces no crop and no cattle. For the landowner, it is a cost: fencing, fire control, keeping intruders out, and the income the same land would produce if it were cleared. Brazilian law recognises this. Federal Law 14,119 of 2021 created the national policy for payment for environmental services (PSA), which allows a landowner to be paid for the service that a standing forest provides to everyone else.

That is the gap the Neutraza was built for: connecting people and companies who want a specific forest to keep standing with the landowners who are keeping it.

From a polygon to a hectare

The platform starts with the polygon of the Legal Reserve, taken from the CAR or from the property's own georeferenced file. That polygon is stored in a geospatial database, where the area is measured on the geoid, not estimated.

The reserve is then divided into a deterministic grid of one-hectare cells. Deterministic means the grid is calculated from the polygon itself: the same reserve always produces the same cells, in the same positions. Each cell is one FRU (Forest Reserve Unit). It has a fixed place on the map, a code, and a public page of its own.

What "traceable" means

Every FRU page can be opened by scanning the QR code printed on the certificate, and the address never changes. On that page, the visitor finds, for that specific hectare and the reserve around it:

• the CAR situation, checked against the official registry;
• satellite imagery from Sentinel-2, with a vegetation cover index calculated from the image itself;
• the land-use series from MapBiomas, which separates native forest from pasture and crops inside the same perimeter;
• deforestation alerts from DETER and the annual PRODES record, both published by the Brazilian space agency (INPE);
• the decision of an independent auditor, who reviews the file before the reserve is marked as verified.

None of these numbers are typed by hand. They are read from the sources and stored with the date of each reading, so the page can be checked against the source.

What the Holder receives

The person or company that supports a hectare — the Holder — receives a certificate with a unique number, a verification hash and the QR code. The certificate is a record of a hectare that exists, at a place that can be visited on the map. The public page keeps updating as new satellite passes arrive, so the Holder can go back to the same hectare a year later and see it.

What the Guardian receives

The landowner — the Guardian — receives a share of the support and, just as important, an independent record that the forest is standing. For a landowner, that record has value of its own: it documents compliance with the Forest Code with third-party evidence.

Not a carbon credit

A FRU is not a carbon credit. It does not claim a quantity of carbon, and it does not offset an emission. It is simpler than that: one hectare of native forest, located, verified and kept standing. You can point to it.