Abstract
Land use and cover changes (LUCC) have been identified as one of the main causes of biodiversity loss and deforestation in the world. Fundamentally, the urban land use has replaced agricultural and forest cover causing loss of environmental services. Monitoring and quantifying LUCC are essential to achieve a proper land management. The objective of this study was to analyze the LUCC in the metropolitan area of Tepic-Xalisco during the period 1973–2015. To find the best fit and obtain the different land use classes, supervised classification techniques were applied using Maximum Likelihood Classification (MLC), Support Vector Machines (SVMs) and Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs). The results were validated with control points (ground truth) through cross tabulation. The best results were obtained from the SVMs method with kappa indices above 85%. The transition analysis infers that urban land has grown significantly during 42 years, increasing 62 km2 and replacing agricultural areas at a rate of 1.48 km2/year. Forest loss of 5.78 km2 annually was also identified. The results show the different land uses distribution and the dynamics developed in the past. This information may be used to simulate future LUCC and modeling different scenarios.
Highlights
Terrestrial ecosystems are important components of nature since they have biological and functional effects on climate regulation, the hydrologic cycle and as a source of natural resources to satisfy human needs
The ecosystems have been subject to accelerated processes of land use and cover changes (LUCC) [2], which have been identified as one of the main factors contributing to global environmental change [3,4,5], as a result of major current environmental problems [6] such as land loss and degradation, climate change, biodiversity loss, deforestation [7] and ecosystems fragmentation [4,8,9], which in turn cause loss of associated environmental services [10] to such a degree that more than half of the world’s forest cover has been lost, and around 30% of these ecosystems face degradation processes
The distribution of natural vegetation has been studied for monitoring LUCC, but most of the research conducted at a regional scale has focused on the analysis of losses in natural vegetation and deforestation [15,16]
Summary
Terrestrial ecosystems are important components of nature since they have biological and functional effects on climate regulation, the hydrologic cycle and as a source of natural resources to satisfy human needs. The distribution of natural vegetation has been studied for monitoring LUCC, but most of the research conducted at a regional scale has focused on the analysis of losses in natural vegetation and deforestation [15,16]. Since local scale studies on LUCC have been scarce [14], the present work was centered on monitoring LUCC locally, paying particular attention to the urban land use in the metropolitan area of Tepic-Xalisco as a starting point for further research on urban growth simulation and future scenarios design
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