It is expected that the application of a restrictive legal instrument would be an important barrier to human pressures on protected areas in Brazil. One aspect that remains to be determined is whether the applied restrictions will be related to the quality of scenarios at the borders of protected areas. The objective of this work was to analyze the capacity for minimizing the impacts on two protected areas and to identify the effective function of the barrier imposed by an environmental legal border. The borders of two protected areas, the Despraiado Sustainable Development Reserve and the Jureia-Itatins State Ecological Station, as well as the corresponding buffer zone were studied. The historical evolution of the land cover/land use of these regions was analyzed by dividing the regions into 900 m(2) hexagonal units. The scenarios for the years 1962, 1980 and 2007 were overlaid for each hexagon. The hexagons were classified according to the possible effects of conservation, and the results were quantified in terms of the frequency of land use and ecological flows. A simulation of future land use in 2028 was performed using the Kappa index, Markov chain modeling, multi-criteria analysis and cellular automata modeling. Based on the trend for the last 45 years, a very dynamic interaction at the legal boundaries was identified; in certain cases, either conservation or degradation were stimulated, and the intended objectives of legal environmental measures were never fulfilled. The simulation showed that by 2028, the frontiers of these protected areas will retain less than 10% of the natural vegetation cover, and 43% of this area will be covered with banana plantations. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.38378387