Globalization, land cover, population, climate, and topography relationships in the subtropical forests of South America

GRAU, HR; IZQUIERDO, A; GASPARRI, NI; PAOLASSO, P; AIDE, TM; CLARK, M; KRAPOVICKAS, J; ARAOZ, E; CARILLA, J; TORRES, R

Tempe, Arizona, USA

Congreso; GLP Open Science Meeting 2010 – Land Systems, Global Change and Sustainability; 2010

The Global Land Project

We compared patterns of deforestation and forest expansion in the three main forested ecoregions of subtropical South America: Atlantic humid forests, Chaco dry forests, and Seasonal montane Yungas Forests; and We explored the relationships between these changes, climate, human demography and globalization-driven socioeconomic changes during the last decades. The largest remaining forest patch of the Atlantic forest occurs in the province of Misiones; where the dominant land use pattern during the past decades has been deforestation, largely driven by small scale traditional agriculture associated to rural population. Rural-urban migration, stimulated to globalization-driven economic activities such as growing tourism, has reduced the deforestation pressure. The Chaco dry forest ecoregión includes the largest continuous forest outside the Amazon in the continent. In this ecoregión, rapid deforestation started in the early 1970´s in association to regional rainfall increase. During the last four decades, deforestation has accelerated, driven by the expansion of commodity oriented crops (mainly soybean) and livestock, which by being highly technified have become largely independent on local demography and climate. In contrast to the other two ecoregions, in the Yungas montane forests, forests have expanded in association to agriculture and grazing disintensification due to strong population urbanization, rainfall increase and changes in the fire regime. We use the different case studies to derive a conceptual framework