Three decades of landscape change across the largest peri-urban horticultural region of Argentina: urban growth, productive intensification and the need of resilient landscapes management

BALDINI CAROLINA; MARASAS MARIANA EDITH; DROZD ANDREA ALEJANDRA

2019 Impact Factor 2.093 Journal of Environmental Planning and Management

Taylor & Francis

Año: 2021

1360-0559

Urbanization and agricultural land expansion are the largest drivers of global land cover change. Here, we aimed to quantify three decades of land-use/land-cover change across one of the main horticultural region of South America. We assessed landscape change implementing a supervised classification workflow on Landsat satellite imagery (1986, 1996, 2005 and 2015). Between 1986 and 2015, horticulture extent decreased (51,47%) at the expense of high increase in greenhouses (2652.83%). Additionally, high density urbanization experienced a strong expansion (111.58%), while low density urbanization increased only between 1986 and 2005, replacing natural grassland, herbaceous parks and livestock. These results demonstrate a regional urban growth and productive intensification process that echoes global similar processes with consequential losses of open field horticultural areas and a non-equitable distribution of semi natural areas in this region. Adequate territorial planning towards ecological resilient territories that consider ecological processes and prioritize semi-natural vegetation cover is urgently needed.