Three stories behind the same landscape: the trajectory of the land-use change in the Upper Paraná Atlantic Forest

DE ANGELO, C.; MARTINEZ PARDO, JULIA; INSAURRALDE, J. A.; LOPEZ DURE, J.; PAVIOLO, A.; DI BITETTI, M. S.

Monterrey, California

Conferencia; 22nd Annual Conference of the Society for Conservation GIS; 2019

Society for Conservation GIS

A specific trajectory for land-use change results from the interactions between the ecological characteristics of the landscape and socio-economic development. The Upper Paraná Atlantic Forest (UPAF) is distributed along three countries (Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay). Our objective was to describe the changes in land use along the UPAF, comparing the transformation process in the three countries and discussing some drivers. We characterized the land uses by satellite image classification in four periods: 1973, 1988, 2004 and 2015. We use PCA to summarize the information land cover change and to describe the trajectories of change. Agricultural expansion and transformation of more than 75,000 km2 of native forest characterized the UPAF between 1973 and 2015. Argentina showed growth in agricultural and forestry activities but maintained a high proportion of forest. In Brazil, the forest was highly fragmented in 1973 and the intensification dominated the region. Paraguay offered the biggest changes, almost 50,000 km2 of forest transformed to small-scale agriculture or directly to intensive agriculture. These varied results could be interpreted within the stages of the transition of land uses: Argentina in the early stages, Brazil in the most advanced and Paraguay in the midst of these situations. The characterization of a landscape from its history and trajectory of change increases the capacity to predict future changes and prevent associated environmental impacts.