Latin American cities as regional landscape controls of change and stability

GRAU, HR

Beijing

Congreso; Global Land Programme, Open Science Meeting; 2016

Global Land Programma - Chinese Academy of Sciences

Urban centers are a distinctive cultural landscape feature with huge and growing influence on the functioning of ecological and land systems. Most studies on the ecological effects of urban growth have focused on the impacts on increased compsumption of nearby or distant resources that drive land use and ecological change. However, urban centers constitute long term persistent landscape units and (in addition to change) they promote landscape stability and resilience by different mechanisms (e.g. peri-urban forest transition, stable agricultural systems relying on urban-based knowledge and products´ demand, protected areas derived from urban culture and aesthetics. We use community ecology (e.g. disturbance ecology, rank-abundance curves, density dependency and foraging theory) to describe the trends and processes of land use change associated with the history of urban growth and spatial dynamics of Latin American cities since the European invasion in the early 16th century to the present. Much of the urban matrix of Latin America was established during the 16th century and persisted to the present in association to distinctive features of the Latin American landscape (low rural population and overall population density, strong historical influence of teleconnections, and a central global role as provider of agricultural products and reservoir of biodiversity). Different examples show that urban centers contribute to landscape and land use stability and resilience, which have received much less attention than the drivers and forcing factors of change.