Land use and land cover change in a tropical mountain landscape of northern Ecuador: Altitudinal patterns and driving forces.

ABSTRACT: Tropical mountain ecosystems are threatened by land use pressures, compromising their capacity to provide ecosystem services. Although local patterns and interactions among anthropogenic and biophysical factors shape these socio-ecological systems, the analysis of landscape changes and their driving forces is often qualitative and sector oriented. Using the Driver-Pressure-State-Impact-Response (DPSIR) framework, we characterized land use land cover (LULC) dynamics using Markov chain probabilities by elevation and geographic settings and then integrated them with a variety of publicly available geospatial and temporal data into a Generalized Additive Model (GAM) to evaluate factors driving such landscape dynamics in a sensitive region of the northern Ecuadorian Andes. In previous agricultu

SUBMITTER: Guarderas P 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9330684 | biostudies-literature | 2022

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature