CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

Land use change is a key component of regional environmentalchange. In mountain regions, where conditions for agricultureand human life are often difficult, land use trends aredominated by changes in the population?s distribution acrossrural and urban areas and shifts in the main human activities.In the Argentinian puna?a high-elevation subtropical plateau ofabout 95,000 km2 situated above 3200 masl?land is chieflyused for grazing, mining, and tourism. In this article, we analyzetrends in these land uses over the last 57 years in the context ofclimatic changes toward drier and warmer conditions. Since1960, the human population grew from 80,000 to 130,000; butthis increase largely occurred in the scattered urban centers,while the rural population decreased. The main livestock?sheep?showed a net decrease of around 100,000 animals(?18.5%), with numbers increasing between 1960 and 1980and then dropping markedly. The number of mining operationsdeclined during the 1970s and 1980s and then rose sharply,reaching a 30% increase since the 1990s. Simultaneously,structural wild vicun~a populations increased from a fewthousand to around 130,000. These results show thatenvironmental changes over the past half century involved amajor wildlife recovery associated with a change fromwidespread extensive grazing to intensive but spatially limitedimpacts around mining operations and growing urban centers.Tourism emerged as a new activity over the last decades, butthe environmental impacts have been poorly studied. Topromote local development and regional conservation, researchpriorities should include (1) empirical assessments of theecological consequences of land use changes, such as grazingregimes shifting from domestic to wild herbivores, as well as theimpacts of mining, tourism, and urbanization on wetlands andhydrological regimes; (2) modeling of future scenarios of miningand tourism expansion and resulting conflicts withenvironmental conservation; and (3) coproduction of knowledgeabout interactions among land uses, climate change, and thedifferent decision-making agents.