In the face of concerns about environmental issues due to human activities, Protected Areas are known as an instrument designed to preserve natural resources and biodiversity. The Brasília National Forest composes the "green belt" of the Distrito Federal. However, due to proximity to urban areas, the disordered and uncontrolled urban development in the surrounding forest has been causing damage to the natural wilderness. The purpose of the buffer zone is to minimize negative impacts of human activities; it is essential to guarantee sustainable land use in the surrounding areas. The objective of this research is verify the spatial and temporal dynamics of land cover in the buffer zone of Brasília National Forest. The landscape composition was compared between the years 1999-2015, in an extension of 3 km around Brasilia National Forest. The spatial and temporal analysis was performed by a supervised classification tool from ArcGIS software. Results show that the classes Cerrado, Riparian Forest and Reforestation do not present great variation, those are protected by environmental legislation. The urbanization registered considerable increase, in 1999 accounted for 12.3% of the study area, and then represented 23.5% (2015). Agriculture decreased from 31.3% (1999) to 21.0% (2015) due to replacement by urban areas. The urban consolidation occurred mainly in the Counties Taguatinga, Vicente Pires and Ceilândia; also areas that were previously intended for agricultural use have given place to irregular occupation. As a result, Protected Areas suffers from fragmentation of natural vegetation and impacts caused by urban growth, increasing the edge effect.