Land cover changes and ecosystem services at the Negro river basin, Argentina: what is missing for better assessing the nature´s contribution?

ZILIO, M.I.; BOHN, V.Y.; PICCOLO, M.C.; PERILLO, G.M.E.

International Journal of River Basin Management

Taylor & Francis

Lugar: Londres; Año: 2021

Ecosystem services are critical to sustaining human activity on freshwater systems since food, energy,and water provision directly depends on them. Identifying and monitoring ecosystem services cancontribute to a better understanding of basin dynamics and, consequently, improve the results ofresource management along the watersheds. In turn, ecosystem services provision is continuouslysubject to natural and anthropogenic stressors, among which land cover changes play a crucialrole. The Negro is a river entirely located in Argentinean territory, and its basin constitutes one ofthe largest and most complex watersheds of the country. This paper characterized the Negro Riverbasin, analyzed land cover changes in the area between the years 1992 and 2015, and determinedits impact over the value of the ecosystem services in the watershed. Our results indicate that notonly the land cover in the Negro River basin has remained relatively unchanged during the periodunder study, but also the value of ecosystem services exhibits only a slight decrease according tothe traditional value transfer. Despite this, the contribution of nature to socioeconomicdevelopment in the area seems to be substantially higher when considering other factorsexcluded from the traditional analysis of ecosystem services, such as the exploitation of nonrenewableresources and their production chains. In this context, we discussed the usefulness ofthe performed analysis in this particular basin, which has suffered a profound and fastsocioeconomic transformation related to the oil and gas production during last years and pointedout some guidelines to assess better the contribution of nature to socioeconomic development insimilar cases.