Abstract
The temperate forests of northern Mexico possess a great diversity of unique and endemic species, with the greatest associations of pine-oak in the planet occurring within them. However, the ecosystems in this region had experienced an accelerated fragmentation process in the past decades. This study described and quantified the landscape fragmentation level of a degraded watershed located in this region. For that, data from the Landsat series from 1990, 2005 and 2017, classified with the Support Vector Machine method, were used. The landscape structure was analyzed based on six metrics applied at both, the landscape and class levels. Results show considerable gains in surface area for the land use land cover change (LULC) of secondary forest while the Primary Forest (PF) lost 18.1% of its area during 1990–2017. The PF increased its number of patches from 7075 to 12,318, increased its patch density (PD) from 53.51 to 58.46 # of patches/100 ha, and reduced its average patch size from 39.21 to 15.05 ha. This made the PF the most fragmented LULC from the 5 LULCs evaluated. In this study, strong fluctuations in edge density and PD were registered, which indicates the forests of northern Mexico have experienced a reduction in their productivity and have been subjected to a continuous degradation process due to disturbances such as fires, clandestine and non-properly controlled logging, among others.
Highlights
This study investigated the land use land cover change (LULC) dynamics and in its implications on the fragmentation level of a temperate forest ecosystem located in Chihuahua, Mexico
Five types of LULC were obtained for the study area, as they are the most representative for the region (Figure 3)
According to the classification method applied for the dates evaluated in this study (1990, 2005 and 2017), the two LULC
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Forests are one of the most widely distributed natural resources on Earth [1]. These are the support of a wide range of environmental services for socioeconomic development, environmental protection and human well-being [2]. Non-properly controlled timber production, increment of the surface area for agriculture, cattle grazing and the expansion of urban settlements, threaten forest ecosystems in many regions of the world [3]
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