Assessment of vegetation aptitude to accomodate organic beekeeping

Abstract

The aptitude offered by land vegetation to accommodate organic beekeeping was assessed in the Santuario Apicola Paz de Aculeo, located in the Metropolitan Region of Chile. A multicriteria analysis methodology combining geomatics and remote sensing was designed. For this purpose, critical vegetation variables for forage selection by the bee populations were valued on the main vegetation units cadastrated for the study area. Thereafter, they were subject to a lineal combination that hypothesized several weighting scenarios. The afore-mentioned enabled to classify the units according to their aptitude to accommodate the beekeeping, which were further characterized according to their vegetation vigor throughout the phenological cycle; derived from NDVI (normalized difference vegetation index) composites, as well as to their topographic variability; derived from a DEM (digital elevation model). The results show that no matter the scenario supposed, the vegetation units of the study area can be divided into five aptitude classes, with those embracing the highest aptitude (1 and 2) as the most prevailing; being distributed at variable altitudes of generally southwest aspect. Although the NVDI composites yielded differences between classes, those were small and non-significant, as a variance analysis pointed out. This study seeks to approximate the management and planning of the beekeeping productive system of local scale to the geotechnologies usage. Further efforts could apply a similar methodology on more complex and heterogeneous vegetation areas with the aim of proving its versatility.