Fragmentation of the landscape in the Esmeraldas River basin – Ecuador

• Autor(a) principal: Reyes Vera, Carlos Humberto
• Data de Publicação: 2022
• Outros Autores: González Quiñonez, Luis Adrián, Cevallos Mina, Mirna Geraldine, Realpe Bolaños, Karla Roxeyine, Estrada Vásquez, Erick Lenin, Delgado Rezavala, Freddy Junior
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: spa
• Título da fonte: Sapienza (Curitiba)
• Texto Completo: https://journals.sapienzaeditorial.com/index.php/SIJIS/article/view/301
• topic: Forest fragmentation, landscape metrics, land use changes, coverage analysis, Esmeraldas River basin; Fragmentación de bosques, métricas del paisaje, cambios de usos del suelo, análisis de coberturas, cuenca hidrográfica del río Esmeraldas.

The degree of fragmentation of the ecosystems of the Esmeraldas river basin that covers an area of ​​21,664 km2 and with a great variety of ecosystem resources and services that have deteriorated with changes in land use is analyzed. The methodology used in the study was based on the application of the ArcGis software for the delimitation of the Esmeraldas river basin and the bases of vegetation cover and land use, generating new tables of attributes with reclassified classes, generating maps of land uses and vegetation cover of the years 1990, 2002 which were entered into the Fragstat 4.2 software for analysis, resulting in the metrics: patch density, number of patches, total area and aggregation index, determining a loss of the total area in the forest class for 2002 of 55% of the forest landscape, the highest fragmentation density occurred in 2002 and 2015 and the loss of the number of patches was represented with greater intensity in 2002 for all classes except for the bare soil class; It should be emphasized that the application of these programs are of vital importance to know the current state of the landscape that we have and, according to the results, it would be recommended to apply biodiversity conservation strategies accompanied by the application of good environmental practices.