The creation of units of conservation (UCs) is one of the strategies adopted by many countries to stop the high index of devastation and to protect some of the ecosystems existents. However, only the creation of units of conservation is not enough
to assure the natural patrimony of one region. It is needed to promote the implementation and the effective management of those areas, so they can execute the objectives they were created for. This work had as its aim to make a diagnosis of the present situation in six parks in the county of Rio de Janeiro, whichever they are, the Tijuca Forest National Park, the State Park of Pedra Branca, the Municipal Natural Park of Serra do Mendanha, the Municipal Natural Park of Prainha, the Municipal Natural
Park of Marapendi and the Municipal Natural Park Chico Mendes, in order to characterize the effectiveness of managements of those UCs and to produce subsidies to support the administration and the public politics. To reach all these it was used an adaptation of the RAPPAM method - Rapid Assessment and Priorization of Protected Area Management, developed by World Wide Fund For Nature (WWF, 2002). To evaluate the effectiveness of management 18 parameters were approached: objectives of the creation; land situation; physical demarcation; planning; process of taking decisions; human resources; financial and material resources; control and monitoring; scientific research; environmental interpretation and education; public relations; public use; protection against forest fires; infra-structure; equipments, relation with its neighbor areas; institutional partnership; knowledge; quality and importance of the protected resources. Each parameter was divided in indicators, in a total of 111. Besides that it was evaluated the pressures to the environmental integrity of the six parks regarding to frequency, criticism level and tendency. Twenty pressures were identified, hunting, extraction of non-woodworker products and biological contamination the most frequent and urban growth and contamination of the natural resources the ones with the highest levels of criticism and the only pressures that showed behavior tending to increase in most of the UCs. Considering the effectiveness of management, only the National Park of Tijuca obtained satisfactory level of management, with 76.65% of the optimum total.
