Landscape responses to a century of land use along the northern Patagonian forest-steppe transition |
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Authors: | Juan H Gowda T Kitzberger A C Premoli |
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Institution: | (1) Laboratorio Ecotono, Universidad Nacional del Comahue, INIBIOMA-CONICET, Quintral 1250, 8400 Bariloche, Argentina |
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Abstract: | Land use history reconstructions in temperate regions of the Northern Hemisphere indicate that periods of deforestation are
often followed by natural afforestation, so that the long-term outcome at the landscape level will be a balance of retractions
and advances of plant communities associated with varying local land uses. During the last decades of the XIX century, large
forest areas were cleared in Northwestern Patagonia to open farmland. In this article, we compared historical land use/land
cover maps with land cover maps derived from Landsat images to analyze the factors that may have influenced the dynamics of
land cover change of the forest-steppe ecotone during the last 100 years. Our results indicate that Patagonian forests underwent
a rapid initial recovery after the extensive fires of last century, replacing mainly shrublands. More than 50% of the old
burns are currently covered by forests, and modern fires affect areas characterized by fire-prone vegetation. Whereas natural
afforestation is an ongoing process positively associated with moisture, the rate of forest losses has increased during the
last three decades, concentrating on xeric aspects and the vicinity of roads. We conclude that the outcome of the dynamics
between fire-intolerant forests and fire-prone plant communities will largely depend on human-related activities, modeled
by structural features of the landscape (i.e., topography, dominant winds), and processes triggered by past land uses. |
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