Forest transition, agriculture adjustment, and environmental services in Latin American ecosystems

GRAU, HR; AIDE, TM; CLARK, M

Campos de Jordao, Brasil

Congreso; Latin American Landscape Ecology; 2009

International Association for Landscape Ecology

We discuss different case studies of forest transition in Central America, the Caribbean and Subtropical Argentina. In all cases, we observe ecosystems recovery in montane ecosystems, associated to rural-urban migration and disintensification of marginal productive uses; this process is generally positive for the conservation of highly diverse montane ecosystems which have a significant role in watershed conservation. In contrast, flat dry forest life zones, are being deforested for the expansion of modern mechanized agriculture, which threatens this important biome and results in significant emissions of atmospheric CO2. The emerging common pattern is an increased agriculture production associated to improvements in human life quality associated to rural-urban migration, and a shift in conservation threats, where dry forests emerge as an urgent conservation priority. We discuss hypothesis to be tested at a continental scale of analysis and present an on-going methodological development to relate demographic, land use, and forest patterns across Latin America based on the combination of high temporal resolutions satellites (MODIS – NOAA AVHRR) and high spatial resolution terrain control (Quickbird scenes in Google Earth ®).