Mapping and Characterizing the Green Belt of Córdoba: Land Dynamics and the Urban-Rural Transformation Process

Nicolás A Mari,Alejandro Benitez,Victoria Marinelli,Beatriz Giobellina,Abubaker Haroun Mohamed Adam

doi:10.14302/issn.2639-3166.jar-19-2785

Nicolás A Mari, Alejandro Benitez + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.14302/issn.2639-3166.jar-19-2785

Copy DOI

Abstract

In Córdoba, Argentina, the peri-urban horticulture is in conflict with industrial agriculture and urban development. This problem is partly due to urban expansion to rural areas occurred in the last years and to monoculture farming, which has replaced traditional fruit and vegetable cropping in the region. This transformation process has raised concern about the current and future availability of productive sectors that can sustain food supply within the city boundaries and its immediate surroundings as well as about the loss of ecosystem services associated with peri-urban natural environments. Although these dynamic processes are well known, they have not been described or quantified in Córdoba. Baseline information about land use and its dynamics in productive areas or about number of producers is insufficient and/or out of date. At O-AUPA (Spanish acronym for Observatory of Urban and Peri-urban Agriculture and Agroecology) different mapping strategies are developed to contribute to the understanding of the land dynamics in the Green Belt of Córdoba (GBC) and the rural environments surrounding the city. In this work, we present a method based on the use of remote sensing and geographical information systems to characterize urban, peri-urban and rural areas of Córdoba city with the aim of evaluating the temporal dynamics of urban growth and the current state of land use and cover. We mapped and quantified the urban growth between 1974 and 2014, and evaluated land use in peri-urban and rural areas in 2015. We used satellite information from Landsat TM 5 to map the urban growth via a principal component analysis (PCA) and SPOT 5 imagery to characterize the current land use and land cover with the support vector machine classification algorithm. The results show an urban area growth of 46.5% over almost 40 years within the boundaries of the Capital department. Farm plot size increased, showing a concentration of land ownership, implying a reduced number of producers. Evidence indicates the importance of defining land planning guidelines that limit the advance of the urban frontier to valuable agricultural systems, ensure diversification of productive activities and protect and develop the fresh food production systems at the local level.

Highlights

Land use planning, is a crucial process that requires that social actors assemble knowledge of the strategic variables generated by the complex dynamics and changes in the biophysical, socioeconomic, cultural, technological, and political situation in a territory
Based on data collected from inter-institutional participative workshops, surveys to producers, satellite data, as well as on the use of Geographical information Systems (GIS), we propose 1) characterizing the Green Belt of Córdoba (GBC) by mapping the urban area of Córdoba city in 1974 and 2014 and determining the urban growth over that 40-year period and 2) determining the current agricultural land cover and use and the changes in agricultural parceling
The area covers the historical Green Belt of Córdoba (GBC), including three well-defined sectors: the northern sector, irrigated by Canal Maestro Norte; Villa Retiro, Villa Esquiú, El Quebrachal, part of Colonia Tirolesa; the eastern sector covers the area of Chacras de la Merced, and the southern sector includes the road to San Carlos, Ferreyra, defined by the irrigation system –Canal Maestro Sur, which is derived from San Roque reservoir, they are currently supplied in part by Los Molinos reservoir. (Figure 1)

Summary

Introduction

Land use planning, is a crucial process that requires that social actors assemble knowledge of the strategic variables generated by the complex dynamics and changes in the biophysical, socioeconomic, cultural, technological, and political situation in a territory. Land use and land cover type (agricultural and natural) require an accurate analysis of their spatial and temporal distribution, which evidences the production rate in a region and agroecosystem stability and capacity to provide ecosystem services [2]. Distribution of the population in the urban and rural settings, the impact of rapid city expansion on the provision of ecosystem goods and services, and the agricultural expansion processes appear to be the dominant factors in land use changes worldwide [4] [5]

Methods

Results

Conclusion