ASSESSING FRAGMENTATION AND DEGRADATION OF DRYLAND FOREST ECOSYSTEMS

CRISTIAN ECHEVERRÍA; TOMAS KITZBERGER; RAUL RIVERA GARCÍA; ROBERT MANSON; RAUL VACA; LUCIANA MARÍA CRISTOBAL; GUILLERMO MACHUCA; DAVID GONZALEZ; RODRIGO FUENTES

Principles and Practice of Forest Landscape Restoration: Case studies from the drylands of Latin America

UICN

Año: 2011; p. 65 - 130

Spatial patterns of forest cover can be understood as the spatial arrangement or configurationof forested ecosystems across a landscape (Forman and Godron, 1986). The importanceof studying spatial patterns of forest cover is now widely appreciated, owing to the complexlink between pattern and process in a landscape (Nagendra et al., 2004), and the widelydocumented effects of habitat fragmentation on biodiversity. As a result, diverse studies havesought to develop measures of landscape pattern that may be used to monitor changes inforest cover (Sano et al., 2009; Shuangcheng et al., 2009; Zeng and Wu, 2005).According to the driving factors that operate in a given landscape, spatial pattern canpresent a variety of different behaviours over time. For instance, loss and fragmentation offorest cover are among the most important transformations of landscape configuration occurringin many parts of the world (Carvalho et al., 2009; Fialkowski and Bitner, 2008). Onthe other hand, pattern change associated with forest recovery or regeneration may lead toan increase of forest cover and connectivity (Baptista 2010; Box 3.1).