Abstract
In the Amazon, the development and paving of roads connects regions and peoples, and over time can form dense and recursive networks, which often serve as nodes for continued development. These developed areas exhibit robust fractal structures that could potentially link their spatial patterns with deforestation processes. Fractal dimension is commonly used to describe the growth trajectory of such fractal structures and their spatial-filling capacities. Focusing on a tri-national frontier region, we applied a box-counting method to calculate the fractal dimension of the developed areas in the Peruvian state of Madre de Dios, Acre in Brazil, and the department of Pando in Bolivia, from 1986 through 2010. The results indicate that development has expanded in all three regions with declining forest cover over time, but with different patterns and rates in each country. Such differences were summarized within a proposed framework to indicate deforestation progress/level, which can be used to understand and regulate deforestation and its evolution in time. In addition, the role and influence of scale was also assessed, and we found local fractal dimensions are not invariant at different spatial scales and thus concluded such scale-dependent features of fragmentation patterns are here mainly shaped by the road paving.
Highlights
Land use and land cover changes are occurring globally and at increasingly unprecedented rates, impacting almost all major biomes worldwide [1,2]
Significant attention has been drawn to areas of tropical forest cover, and the Amazon region across the past few decades due to the alarming rates of clearing which have been occurring in the Amazon region [3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13]
Over the past 25 years, we observed an increase in non-forest area for all three states (Acre, Madre de Dios, and Pando), at the expense of forest areas, while our results across all three regions reveal a landscape still dominated by forest cover up until 2010 with Acre at 80%, Madre de Dios at 97.4%, and Pando at 98%, forest cover remaining
Summary
Land use and land cover changes are occurring globally and at increasingly unprecedented rates, impacting almost all major biomes worldwide [1,2]. Significant attention has been drawn to areas of tropical forest cover, and the Amazon region across the past few decades due to the alarming rates of clearing which have been occurring in the Amazon region [3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13] Such losses have profound impacts on biodiversity, global carbon storage, potential future and current climate changes, all of which have significant impacts on the resilience of social-ecological systems [14]. As such, understanding the process of deforestation and the pattern of development is key in this critical ecosystem This human-induced alteration may signal an impending ecological meltdown [15], that is, for example, the loss of predator stimulates the disproportionate increase of prey and dramatic reduction of seedlings and saplings of canopy tree, and sometimes ends in biodiversity loss or even a biotic collapse [16,17,18].
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