Abstract
The aim of the study was to quantify in an explorative way the damage of the wetland area because of drying and construction activities from 1950 to 2016 in Bogotá city. To such end, an estimate of the wetland area of Bogotá was made for the years 1950, 1989 and 2016 by reviewing the geographic information of the Agustín Codazzi Geographical Institute (IGAC) and the Aqueduct and Sewer Bogotá Company (EAAB). The information was analyzed of the area variation for each water body. The data shows that the city's water mirror area has decreased by an average of 84.52% between the years of 1950, 1989 and 2016, except for El Tunjo wetland, which grew 79.45%. This situation shows that the protection that has been implemented happened too late, since a considerable portion of these ecosystems rich in fauna and flora is lost. This has generated phenomena such as: flooding of settlements in these areas, disappearance, or displacement of endemic species of flora and fauna and displacement of wetlands.
Highlights
There are several ways of describing the wetlands
The decrease of the wetlands in the city of Bogota is directly related to the human settlements occurring during the second half of the 20th century because they located around water bodies
The care of wetlands was inexistent to the point of almost desiccating them due to the need to supply the population with infrastructure and basic sanitation
Summary
There are several ways of describing the wetlands. the most extensive is the one presented in [1], where the author defined them as “Extensions of marshes, swamps, bogs, or natural or artificial waters, permanent or temporary, stagnant or running, sweet, brackish or salty, including the extensions of sea water with a depth at low tide not bigger than six meters”. According to the Ramsar Convention, wetlands are classified into five great systems according to their biological and physical properties: a) marine: shore wetlands including rocky shores and coral reefs; b) estuarian: deltas, tide marshes, and mangrove swamps; c) lacustrine: lakes; d) riparian: wetlands associated to rivers and streams, and e) marsh: morasses, marshes, and swamps [3] Following this classification, wetlands found in the city of Bogotá are part of the lacustrine and riparian systems, given their elevation above sea level. The migration of rural population to big cities, metropolitan areas, and intermediate cities from 1940 to 1990 was approximately 21.3 million people [5] and generated the increasing of the urban use of land and non-controlled settlements around wetlands This event generated irreparable damages that lead to the complete drying of the water mirror of these ecosystems in order to get urban soil. The aim of this study is to quantify in an explorative way the damaging process of these ecosystems due to drying and construction activities from 1950 to 2016 in Bogota
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