Cultivating the dry forests of South America: Diversity of land users and imprints on ecosystem functioning

Abstract

In the South American dry forest of the Dry Chaco and Chiquitania, the area under cultivation rose from 10% to 19% over the last ten years, and little biophysical, economical, or political constrains seem to prevent further expansion. Although typically associated to a homogeneous agribusiness system, agriculture and its expansion in this territory involve a diverse array of land users. Here we (i) identified and mapped the most conspicuous groups of land users based on existing scientific literature and technical reports, and (ii) described their associated landscape pattern and (iii) vegetation functioning based on different remote sensing tools applied to a set of 218 sample points. We recognized 14 groups of land users of local or foreign origin, composed by individuals or corporative organizations, and dedicated either to pasture or crop production, or its combination. These groups displayed a wide variation in the scale of their operations as suggested by a 60-fold difference in paddock sizes. Twelve years of MODIS-NDVI data showed small and non-significant differences in the magnitude of primary productivity (1.2 fold-difference) but strong contrasts in its seasonality and long-term variability,

Comparative Analysis of MODIS Time-Series Classification Using Support Vector Machines and Methods Based upon Distance and Similarity Measures in the Brazilian Cerrado-Caatinga Boundary

“…This agricultural occupation includes multiple activities and high dynamics in smaller territorial extensions, which affects detection quality using MODIS data [24]. Another constraint is to differentiate the savanna types because they consist of a nearly continuous grass layer overlaid by a discontinuous tree layer.…”

“…Hüttich et al [23] distinguish savanna types in South Africa from the in situ botanical survey combined with Landsat and MODIS images. Baldi et al [24] quantify the connections among landscape patterns, ecosystem functioning, and agricultural use in the Dry Chaco and Chiquitania ecoregions that cover parts of Argentina, Bolivia, and Paraguay using MODIS-Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) time-series data. Portillo-Quintero et al [25] study the correlation between MODIS active fires and forest cover change in the tropical dry forest.…”

Comparison of adaptative strategies to climate variability in rural areas of Argentine Chaco and US Southern Plains during the last century

“…During low-rainfall periods land was allocated to livestock production, while crops were planted when precipitations increased (Viglizzo et al, 1997;Wolfe, 2011). As previous research in Argentina (Viglizzo and Roberto, 1989;Hutchinson et al, 1992;Riera and Pereira, 2009;Baldi et al, 2014) and US (Walthall et al, 2012) has demonstrated, an on-farm diversification of activities was a successful strategy to face climate variability in semiarid and sub-humid regions.…”

Sacred groves, sacrifice zones and soy production: globalization, intensification and neo-nature in South America

“…2013;Gasparri, Grau, and Sacchi 2015;Vallejos et al 2015;Volante and Paruelo 2015). Even highly remote forests like the Chiquitania in eastern Bolivia have declined by some 18 percent (Pinto-Ledezma and Mamani 2014; Baldi et al 2015).…”