Abstract
Remote sensing tools have been long used to monitor landscape dynamics inside and around protected areas. Hereto, scientists have largely relied on land use and land cover (LULC) data to derive indicators for monitoring these dynamics, but these metrics do not capture changes in the state of vegetation surfaces that may compromise the ecological integrity of conservation areas’ landscapes. Here, we introduce a methodology that combines LULC change estimates with three Normalized Difference Vegetation Index-based proxy indicators of vegetation productivity, phenology, and structural change. We illustrate the utility of this methodology through a regional and local analysis of the landscape dynamics in the Cerrado Biome in Brazil in 2001 and 2016. Despite relatively little natural vegetation loss inside core protected areas and their legal buffer zones, the different indicators revealed significant LULC conversions from natural vegetation to farming land, general productivity loss, homogenization of natural forests, significant agricultural expansion, and a general increase in productivity. These results suggest an overall degradation of habitats and intensification of land use in the studied conservation area network, highlighting serious conservation inefficiencies in this region and stressing the importance of integrated landscape change analyses to provide complementary indicators of ecologically-relevant dynamics in these key conservation areas.
Highlights
Protected areas (PAs) currently cover around 15% of the world’s land and inland waters and remain the cornerstone of global biodiversity conservation strategies [1]
The anthropogenic-driven landscape dynamics in the PAs and surroundings highly influence the ecological processes that extend across these areas, such as those related to wildlife movement, the ecosystem functions on which they rely, and the ecosystem services they provide [2,3]
Land Use and Land Cover Change Analysis Results The land use and land cover (LULC) transition matrices of the 61 studied conservation units (CUs) and their buffer zones (BZs) are presented in Appendix D
Summary
Protected areas (PAs) currently cover around 15% of the world’s land and inland waters and remain the cornerstone of global biodiversity conservation strategies [1]. The anthropogenic-driven landscape dynamics in the PAs and surroundings (hereafter referred to as ‘interface areas’) highly influence the ecological processes that extend across these areas, such as those related to wildlife movement (e.g., population dynamics [4] or gene flows [5]), the ecosystem functions on which they rely, and the ecosystem services they provide [2,3] These landscape dynamics can reflect both conservation efforts and the expansion and intensification of human land use, the latter being responsible for the largest negative impact on the conservation status of wildlife species worldwide [6]. The limited development of diversified and relevant indicators of landscape change for conservation biology research might partly explain the scarce landscape and habitat analyses in interface areas
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