Future Scenarios for Land Use in Chile: Identifying Drivers of Change and Impacts over Protected Area System

Abstract

Chile is a country that depends on the extraction and export of its natural resources. This phenomenon has exacerbated different processes of transformation and disturbance of natural and human ecosystems. Land use change has become a key factor for the transformation of ecosystems, causing consequences for biodiversity conservation. In this study, current and future (2030, 2050 and 2080) land use categories were evaluated. Land use projections were analysed together with models of ecosystem distribution in Chile under different climate scenarios, to finally analyse different dynamics of land use change within the protected areas system. In all the scenarios evaluated, land use projections showed an increase in the areas of industrial forest plantations and urban areas and a decrease in natural and agricultural areas could be expected. In relation to ecosystem modeling, vegetational formations located in the center and south of the country could be expected to decrease, while vegetational formations in the north and center of the country could extend their surface area. Inside Chile’s protected area network, anthropic disturbances are currently undergoing expansion, which could have consequences for ecosystems and protected areas located in the central and central–south zones of Chile.

Fauna en vegetación nativa y plantaciones forestales del área periurbana de Quintay: Una oportunidad para la conservación del patrimonio natural en la costa de Chile central

“…Actualmente, cerca de un 75% de la superficie de la localidad de Quintay se encuentra urbanizada, con alrededor del 51% bajo uso urbano de alta y mediana intensidad, y un 23% de baja densidad (IMCC 2020). Además, se pronostica en la zona existirá un aumento de la población en un 54% para el año 2025 (Benavidez-Silva et al 2021).…”

The vegetation of Chile and the EcoVeg approach in the context of the International Vegetation Classification project

“…Chilean governmental conservation agencies are currently using these vegetation units to identify new protected areas through systematic conservation planning (Luebert and Pliscoff 2010;Pliscoff and Fuentes-Castillo 2011). They have also been employed to assess the effects of climate change on Chilean Ecosystems (Pliscoff et al 2012;Arroyo et al 2019;Benavidez-Silva et al 2021), identifying the impacts on biodiversity of the recent 2017 mega-fires in central Chile (Pliscoff et al 2020) and to establish categories of ecosystem risk of collapse (Pliscoff 2015;Alaniz et al 2016;Luebert and Pliscoff 2017;Pliscoff et al 2019) following the recently developed IUCN guidelines (Rodríguez et al 2015). This classification has also been utilised as an input in attempts to establish an ecosystem typology at supra-national level (Luebert and Pliscoff 2009;Josse 2014;Keith et al 2020), and has the potential to be adapted to the EcoVeg classification approach (Faber-Langendoen et al 2014) aimed at providing an international standard for vegetation classification (Faber-Langendoen et al 2018.…”

Historical and future land use and land cover changes in the Fincha watershed, Ethiopia

“…The Cramer's V Coe cient (CVC), sometimes also called Cramer's V strategies, was used to assess the correlations between the various driving variables. According to Eastman (2009), variables that have a Cramer's V>0.40 are good and these drivers will have the greatest impact on the modi cation process and its spatial distribution (Gaur et al 2020;Benavidez-Silva et al 2021;Vu et al 2021).…”