Long-Term Land-Use/Land-Cover Change Increased the Landscape Heterogeneity of a Fragmented Temperate Forest in Mexico

Abstract

The temperate forests of northern Mexico possess a great diversity of unique and endemic species, with the greatest associations of pine-oak in the planet occurring within them. However, the ecosystems in this region had experienced an accelerated fragmentation process in the past decades. This study described and quantified the landscape fragmentation level of a degraded watershed located in this region. For that, data from the Landsat series from 1990, 2005 and 2017, classified with the Support Vector Machine method, were used. The landscape structure was analyzed based on six metrics applied at both, the landscape and class levels. Results show considerable gains in surface area for the land use land cover change (LULC) of secondary forest while the Primary Forest (PF) lost 18.1% of its area during 1990–2017. The PF increased its number of patches from 7075 to 12,318, increased its patch density (PD) from 53.51 to 58.46 # of patches/100 ha, and reduced its average patch size from 39.21 to 15.05 ha. This made the PF the most fragmented LULC from the 5 LULCs evaluated. In this study, strong fluctuations in edge density and PD were registered, which indicates the forests of northern Mexico have experienced a reduction in their productivity and have been subjected to a continuous degradation process due to disturbances such as fires, clandestine and non-properly controlled logging, among others.

Defining Conservation Priorities for Oak Forests in Central Mexico Based on Networks of Connectivity

“…Though, the steppingstone patches in the basin would increase the matrix permeability there are few suitable habitats. This is a recurrent scenario in México, where fragmentation has reduced the large areas and increased the number of small-area patches [3,4,7]. Therefore, particular efforts should be enacted to preserve these large area patches or increase the size of the small ones by restoring vegetation in the vicinity.…”

“…Overall, deforestation is caused by direct factors such as the expansion of agriculture and urban areas [5,6]. The change in vegetation cover results in a fragmented landscape composed of forest remnants with different sizes and shapes that still sustain some ecological processes and values [7][8][9][10]. In other words, during fragmentation the landscape is transformed from a continuum habitat to an ensemble of fragments immersed in a matrix that is different to that of the original vegetation [8,11,12].…”

Study towards Integrating Secondary Forests into Future Land Use Development in Singapore for Biodiversity Objectives

“…The remaining secondary forests are planned for sports and recreation, educational institution, utility, and commercial use. Land use cover change in secondary forests will increase the landscape's fragmentation level and accelerate the fragmentation process of ecosystems [35]. To maximize the conservation benefits of secondary forests, integrating local and regional patterns of fragmentation is critical [19].…”

Landscape Pattern and Succession of Chinese Fir Plantations in Jiangle County, China

“…Landscape indicators are common tools for reflecting the structural composition and spatial configuration of the landscape pattern [36,37], which has been used in previous studies extensively [38][39][40][41]. As forest landscape patterns are complex and cannot be measured using a single indicator, a set of landscape indicators is usually used to identify forest landscape patterns [42]. In order to characterize the landscape pattern of Chinese fir plantations in Jiangle County from 2010 to 2020, this paper, based on previous studies [38][39][40][41][42], by using Fragstats 4.2 software (Informer Technologies Inc., Gillette, WY, USA) to calculate the landscape index, selected Total Class Area (CA), Number of Patch (NP), Largest Patch Index (LPI), Edge Density (ED), Landscape Shape Index (LSI), and Aggregation Index (AI) (Table 1).…”