Abstract
Landscape modification and habitat fragmentation are key drivers of global species and biodiversity loss, as well as a major threat to the conservation of forest ecosystems. Mexico is one of the five biologically richest countries in the world. This study first generated a national level assessment of the fragmentation of temperate and tropical forests in Mexico for 2002, 2008, and 2013. Then, using these results, it explores how transitions to non-forest or to other fragmentation classes have evolved within the previous date fragmentation classes for the 2002–2008 and 2008–2013 periods. The Morphological Spatial Pattern Analysis (MSPA) method was used to assess the forest fragmentation. The results show that high fragmentation classes are more likely to transition to no-forest land covers in tropical than in temperate forests and that these conversions were larger during 2002–2008 than during the 2008–2013 period in both forest types. When analyzing the transitions between fragmentation classes, a higher percent of the forest area remained the same fragmentation class between 2008 and 2013 than from 2002 to 2008. Transitions between forest fragmentation classes were relatively small compared to transitions to no-forest land covers, and transitions to higher fragmentation classes were slightly larger in tropical than in temperate forests.
Highlights
Landscape modification and habitat fragmentation are key drivers of global species and biodiversity loss, and are believed to negatively affect virtually all taxonomic groups of animals and plants, as well as key ecosystem components and functions of temperate and tropical forests for long periods of time [1,2,3,4,5]
The analysis of transitions consisted of the following: First, in ArcGIS 1-NoData raster masks were created for each forest fragmentation class from the Morphological Spatial Pattern Analysis (MSPA) results for 2002 (1 = forest fragmentation class x; NoData = everything else)
Sample of the map output of MSPA fragmentation classes generated with the intext parameter parameter set to “Off” for an area of the tropical forests in 2002
Summary
Landscape modification and habitat (including forests) fragmentation are key drivers of global species and biodiversity loss, and are believed to negatively affect virtually all taxonomic groups of animals and plants, as well as key ecosystem components and functions of temperate and tropical forests for long periods of time [1,2,3,4,5]. This issue of forest fragmentation, and more generally habitat fragmentation, is complex and it is one of the most extensively studied topics in conservation biology [3,4,5,6,7,8,9,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21]. All natural environments are fragmented to some degree and they are subject to continuous change due to natural processes. Numerous temporal and spatial scales must be considered since the relevant scales for different single species, group of species, ecosystem processes, geographic regions, and types of environments are likely to be different. Illustration of of the the fragmentation fragmentation classes classes that that are are generated generated when when setting setting the the intext intext parameter parameter to on (value of 1) or off 0)
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