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Prioritizing land units for environmental management and planning is central in any process aiming at the improvement of urban and environmental conditions. In this study, an algebraic method (lattice theory) was applied to data describing the characteristics of ten land units of a landscape of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Consequently, landscape complexity was modeled and land units were prioritized for land management. While most usual mathematical methods for evaluation involve statistical approaches, the lattice-theoretical approach is a completely different, non-numerical algebraic and qualitative method, offering the advantages of: (a) providing three-dimensional representations of a landscape's complexity; (b) discovering essential structures of data (termed “concepts”) from within landscape data, (c) determining the relative significance (or value) of each criterion and of each land unit for the overall landscape complexity, (d) identifying the land units which are ecologically and geomorphologically more significant for a landscape, (e) mapping landscape complexity and, indeed, mapping total landscape complexity (structural, functional and qualitative) at the land unit level and (f) prioritizing land units in a tropical landscape for strict land management and/or conservation.
