NDLI: Land cover changes in the Lachuá region, Guatemala: patterns, proximate causes, and underlying driving forces over the last 50 years

Content Provider	Springer Nature Link
Author	Quezada, Maura L. Arroyo Rodríguez, Víctor Pérez Silva, Evangelina Aide, T. Mitchell
Copyright Year	2013
Abstract	Identifying the patterns of land cover change (LCC) and their main proximate causes and underlying driving forces in tropical rainforests is an urgent task for designing adequate management and conservation policies. The Lachuá region maintains the largest lowland rainforest remnant in Guatemala, but it has been highly deforested and fragmented during the last decades. This is the first paper to describe the patterns of LCC and the associated political and socioeconomic factors in the region over the last 50 years. We estimated spatial and temporal variations in LCC from a random sample of 24 1-km2 landscape plots during three time periods (1962–1987, 1987–2006, and 2006–2011) and evaluated how they were related to some important proximate causes and underlying driving forces. During the study period, 55 % of forest cover disappeared, at an annual rate of 1.6 %. The deforestation rate increased from 0.6 % (during the first study period) to 2.8 % (last period), but there was very high spatial variation. Landscape plots located outside conservation areas and close to roads lost between 80 and 100 % of forest cover, whereas the forest cover in landscapes located within protected areas remained intact during the study period. The establishment of new human settlements, roads, and annual crops was the main proximate cause during the first period, but during the second and third periods, open areas were mainly created to establish cattle pastures. Because ~75 % of forest cover has disappeared outside the protected areas, the conservation of this biodiversity hot spot will depend on the expansion of protected areas, and the promotion of forest regrowth and alternative biodiversity-friendly land uses in the landscape matrix.
Starting Page	1139
Ending Page	1149
Page Count	11
File Format	PDF
ISSN	14363798
Journal	Regional Environmental Change
Volume Number	14
Issue Number	3
e-ISSN	1436378X
Language	English
Publisher	Springer Berlin Heidelberg
Publisher Date	2013-11-17
Publisher Place	Berlin/Heidelberg
Access Restriction	One Nation One Subscription (ONOS)
Subject Keyword	Forest loss Mesoamerica Land use policy Lowland forest Climate Change Climate Change/Climate Change Impacts Oceanography Geography (general) Regional/Spatial Science Nature Conservation
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article
Subject	Global and Planetary Change

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