Evaluation of recent land-use and land-cover change in a mountain region.

Abstract

Mountain regions are vital to the provision of ecosystem services. “Cofre de Perote” volcano is the eighth highest mountain in Mexico and provides various goods and services to the people living in the central region of Veracruz. Despite being a protected area as a national park, it shows processes of landscape change in recent years. We mapped land-use and land-cover changes (LULCC) based on remote sensing data (Sentinel-2) from 2017 and 2021. The best classifier was the support vector machine with an overall accuracy value of 0.908 ± 0.003 and 0.916 ± 0.004 for 2017 and 2021, respectively. We estimated that 21.77% of the area changed in only four years. The main trajectory of change was from forests to agricultural, with an area of ​​1224.81 ha and an annual rate of change of -2.39%. Updating knowledge on the dynamics of LULCC will allow better conservation actions for the mountain ecosystems.