Three decades of landscape change across the largest peri-urban horticultural region of Argentina: urban growth, productive intensification and the need for resilient landscape management

Abstract

Urbanization and agricultural land expansion are the largest drivers of global land cover change. Here, we aimed to quantify three decades of land-use/land-cover change across one of the main horticultural regions of South America. We assessed landscape change implementing a supervised classification workflow on Landsat satellite imagery (1986, 1996, 2005 and 2015). Between 1986 and 2015, horticulture extent decreased (51.47%) at the expense of a high increase in greenhouses (2652.83%). Additionally, high density urbanization experienced a strong expansion (111.58%), while low density urbanization increased only between 1986 and 2005, replacing natural grassland, herbaceous parks and livestock. These results demonstrate a regional urban growth and productive intensification process that echoes similar global processes with consequential losses of open field horticultural areas and a non-equitable distribution of semi-natural areas in this region. Adequate territorial planning toward ecological resilient territories that consider ecological processes and prioritize semi-natural vegetation cover is urgently needed.

Keywords:

• land cover/land use change
• territorial planning
• urban expansion
• food production
• biodiversity

Acknowledgements

This research was partially supported by the National Council of Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET), National University of La Plata (UNLP) and National University of Avellaneda (UNDAV). We thank the National Commission for Space Activities (CONAE) for providing laboratory time in its institution to perform image processing with ENVI software in the frame of a Gulich Institute Master Program course. Our gratitude goes also to Beatriz Giobellina, Nicolás Marí, Sandra Torrusio, María Rosa Derguy, Matías García, Anabella Ferral, Emilia Yolanda Aguilera, Gustavo Calvanese, Marina Arias and all colleges who contributed with useful discussions, technical information and remote sensing support. We gratefully acknowledge to Ramiro Daniel Crego for his invaluable time expended in reviews and useful discussions and Nora Ward who helped to improve the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/09640568.2021.1947787