Linking Ecosystem Services demand and supply in indigenous hunter-gatherers communities of the degraded Chaco Salteño forests, Argentina

CABELLO, JAVIER; ALCARAZ SEGURA, DOMINGO; VALLEJOS, MARÍA; PARUELO, JOSÉ M.

Leipzig

Workshop; GEO BON Open Science Conference & All Hands Meeting.; 2016

GEOBON

Land use changes in the Chaco Ecoregion takes place on lands historically inhabited by indigenous people. Traditionally, these communities have been devoted to collecting, hunting and cattle ranching as livelihood. As a consequence, contrasting land uses generate critical socio-environmental conflicts. In this study we evaluated the loss of Ecosystem Services (ES) as a result of deforestation and forest degradation derived from agricultural expansion and wood extraction. For this purpose, we estimated the area where a specific demand of final ES (food and materials) exists for 202 indigenous communities in eastern Salta, Argentina, using previous participatory mapping based on the mean distances travelled by the community members for food collection and hunting. Then, to estimate the loss of intermediate ES supply, we first calculated the remaining forest area for the communities after 40 years of land-use change, and second, we evaluated the trends in remote sensing variables related to productivity, fire and climate regulation from 2001 to 2015. We reported that the usage area have been reduced by 18% in relation to the area of forest demand. We detected negative significant trends in variables related to productivity at 64% of the communities. Thus, we obtained measures not only about the loss of effective territory used by the communities, but also about the loss in ecosystem functioning and degradation.