Deforestation divergences in transboundary ecoregions of south-america

MARÍA PIQUER-RODRÍGUEZ; N. IGNACIO GASPARRI; LUCÍA ZARBÁ; H. RICARDO GRAU

Posadas

Congreso; IUFRO; 2018

INTERNATIONAL UNION OF FOREST RESEARCH ORGANIZATIONS

Ecoregions are homogeneous ecological entities of, often, big size that can cross national borders.Likewise, each country has its own socio-economic characteristics influencing land-use patternsthat, in theory, differ within neighboring regions. Yet, global forces can operate across countriesand promote the homogenization of land-use practices regardless of administrative borders.Understanding the national divergences of transboundary ecoregions and the factors thatcharacterize them may aid at improving the natural resource planning of countries at regionalscales. South-America harbors a diversity of nations and dynamic ecoregions that makes it aninteresting study case. We studied the 43 transboundary ecoregions of South-America that areshared among two or more countries and have less than 90% of their area within one country. Wecharacterized the socio-economic development and deforestation patterns of national-ecoregions(i.e., the section of a transboundary ecoregion that lies within a country) using variables ofaccessibility, night-time lights (as an indication of urbanization), fires (as a management tool),cropland expansion, grazing land expansion and deforestation between 2001-2014. We analyzeddivergences by calculating the Euclidean distance of all the variables among pairs of nationalecoregions that shared a border. Our results show that some national-ecoregions experience similar development between national borders. This is, for example, the case of the nationalecoregion Dry Chaco Argentina-Paraguay that is less divergent (i.e., more similar) than the Dry Chaco Bolivia-Paraguay in terms of socio-economic development and deforestation patterns. Our results highlight that planning land use at regional scales should be done with care since assuming that administrative borders differ in their development trends may be an oversimplification andfuture deforestation pathways in neighboring countries may converge. This is of specialimportance in regions that share transboundary natural resources.