Abstract
Despite the overall trend of worldwide deforestation over recent decades, reforestation has also been found and is expected in developing countries undergoing fast urbanization and agriculture abandonment. The consequences of reforestation on landscape patterns are seldom addressed in the literature, despite their importance in evaluating biodiversity and ecosystem functions. By analyzing long-term land cover changes in Puerto Rico, a rapidly reforested (6 to 42% during 1940–2000) and urbanized tropical island, we detected significantly different patterns of fragmentation and underlying mechanisms among forests, urban areas, and wetlands. Forest fragmentation is often associated with deforestation. However, we also found significant fragmentation during reforestation. Urban sprawl and suburb development have a dominant impact on forest fragmentation. Reforestation mostly occurs along forest edges, while significant deforestation occurs in forest interiors. The deforestation process has a much stronger impact on forest fragmentation than the reforestation process due to their different spatial configurations. In contrast, despite the strong interference of coastal urbanization, wetland aggregation has occurred due to the effective implementation of laws/regulations for wetland protection. The peak forest fragmentation shifted toward rural areas, indicating progressively more fragmentation in forest interiors. This shift is synchronous with the accelerated urban sprawl as indicated by the accelerated shift of the peak fragmentation index of urban cover toward rural areas, i.e., 1.37% yr−1 in 1977–1991 versus 2.17% yr−1 in 1991–2000. Based on the expected global urbanization and the regional forest transition from deforested to reforested, the fragmented forests and aggregated wetlands in this study highlight possible forest fragmentation processes during reforestation in an assessment of biodiversity and functions and suggest effective laws/regulations in land planning to reduce future fragmentation.
Highlights
Land use and land cover have been changing dramatically across the globe and significantly impact both natural and human systems [1,2,3]
Deforestation as a means to meet the food demands of the growing population has been a major topic [7,8,9,10,11,12], reforestation has been significant in regions with an economic shift from agriculture to industry or to service during economic globalization, which is discussed in the Forest Transition Theory [2,5,13,14]
The results suggest a general trend that a small number of large patches of urban and forest in the large cells may become more aggregated, as reflected in the increased largest patch index (LPI) and decreased EDGE_AREA
Summary
Land use and land cover have been changing dramatically across the globe and significantly impact both natural and human systems [1,2,3]. Deforestation as a means to meet the food demands of the growing population has been a major topic [7,8,9,10,11,12], reforestation has been significant in regions with an economic shift from agriculture to industry or to service during economic globalization, which is discussed in the Forest Transition Theory [2,5,13,14]. Urban areas expanded at twice the rate of the population increase due to rapid suburban development [3]. Urban expansion drives environmental changes at local, regional, and global scales and impacts biodiversity, biogeochemical cycles, hydrology, climate, and ecosystem services [3,17]
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