Abstract
Understanding how and what land cover changes and transitions have occurred in a territory is crucial to planning and managing high-demand surfaces. At the landscape level, the challenge is determining the allocation and management of various land cover options. Therefore, for natural resources planning and management, a study characterizing and analysing the territory of interest should be included. This work aimed to analyse the changes and land cover patterns in the city of Pereira, Colombia, within the framework of the Colombian Coffee Cultural Landscape. The evaluated period was between 1997 and 2014, and a Geographic Information System, ENVI 4.8 programme and QGIS programme were used for multitemporal analysis. To describe the land cover transitions, two temporal moments were analysed with Landsat satellite images: one moment was for the year 1997, which was taken in August (Landsat 5), and the other moment was for the year 2014, which was taken in July (Landsat 8). At level 1 of CORINE (Coordination of information on the environment), the areas of land cover corresponding to agricultural areas, forests and semi-natural areas decreased most in the analysis period, while artificial surfaces increased. At level 3, the cover with the greatest decrease in territory was coffee crops, which showed a negative annual loss rate of -3.97%, followed by permanent crops (-2.67%). The continuous and discontinuous urban fabric showed the greatest growth with a positive annual rate of 4.14%. In conclusion, the land cover that lost the most territory was coffee crop, mainly due to political-economic factors, such as the dissolution of the International Coffee Agreement and the National Federation of Coffee Growers that discouraged coffee cultivation and permanent crops. Likewise, sociocultural factors, such as smallholder farmers have guided the changes in land cover and have stimulated productive styles to adapt and remain, increasing heterogeneous agricultural areas.
Highlights
In the processes related to human occupation of the territory, there are several changes that require the understanding and research about the elements that motivate local, regional and global changes
The level 1 cover analysis showed an overview that the agricultural areas for 1997 and 2014 were the dominant cover, with 60.7% and 59.4%, respectively, followed by forests and semi-natural areas (34.3% and 31.9%); artificial surfaces had corresponding areas of 3.7% for 1997 and 7.6% for 2014 of the total area of Pereira; water surfaces were evident in 1.2% of the total area for both years (Table 4 and Fig. 2)
The natural and semi-natural surfaces for Pereira in 1997 were mainly distributed as follows: Gallery and riparian forest (GRF) encompassed 6,145.7 ha (10.12%) with patches distributed throughout the municipality; paramo (P) encompassed 5,573.6 ha (9.2%) belonging to the Los Nevados National Natural Park (NNP); dense forest (DF) encompassed 4,804.6 ha (7.9%) of the territory and was mainly located in the upper area of the Otún River basin and east of the city of Pereira; and bamboo forest (BF) encompassed 2,824.9 ha (4.6%)
Summary
In the processes related to human occupation of the territory, there are several changes that require the understanding and research about the elements that motivate local, regional and global changes This approach requires information integration from social, natural and geographic sciences (Rindfuss et al, 2004; Turner et al, 2007), to understand the factors that influence land covers, site diversity and interpret dramatic changes in the transformation of land use, mainly impacting rural areas, such as cultivated land is diminishing (Boudet et al, 2020; Chen et al, 2020; D'Amour et al, 2017; Xia et al, 2020), which lead to the loss of food security of human communities at local scales. This spatial social construction enables assessment of land use planning scenarios to integrate the environmental component in the decisionmaking process for plans and programmes, which can have significant effects on the environment and communities (Loiseau et al, 2012; Sanhouse-Garcia et al, 2017; Ashiagbor et al, 2020; Chen et al, 2020)
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
