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What Drives Accelerated Land Cover Change in Central Argentina? Synergistic Consequences of Climatic, Socioeconomic, and Technological Factors

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Abstract

Synergistic combinations of climatic and land use changes have the potential to produce the most dramatic impacts on land cover. Although this is widely accepted, empirical examples, particularly involving deforestation in Latin America, are still very few. The geographic extent and causes of deforestation in subtropical seasonally dry forests of the world have received very little attention. This is especially true for the Chaco forests in South America, which are being lost at an alarming rate, sometimes higher than those reported for tropical forests. On this basis, the aims of this study were to analyze the changes in land cover that have occurred during the last three decades of the 20th century in the Chaco forests of central Argentina, and to explain the factors that have driven those changes. Results show major land cover changes. Approximately 80% of the area that was originally undisturbed forest is now occupied by crops, pastures, and secondary scrub. The main proximate cause of deforestation has been agricultural expansion, soybean cultivation in particular. This appears as the result of the synergistic convergence of climatic, technological, and socioeconomic factors, supporting the hypothesis of a multiple-factor explanation for forest loss, while providing one of the very few existing analyses of changes in subtropical forests of the world.

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Acknowledgments

We thank the Comisión Nacional de Actividades Espaciales (CONAE) and Instituto Gulich for providing the satellite images and Agustín Prado and Agencia Córdoba Ambiente S.E. for providing records and census data. We are very grateful to Dr. F. Stuart Chapin, III, Nicolás Lucas, and an anonymous reviewer for the constructive suggestions on our manuscript. This study was supported by the National University of Córdoba through SECyT (Resol. 162/06, 197/05, 137/04), the Agencia Córdoba Ciencia S.E., the CONICET (PID 7006), the FONCyT (PICT Redes 275, Préstamo BID 1728/OC-AR), the Darwin Initiative (8/116), and the Inter-American Institute for Global Change Research (IAI) (CRNII 2005 and 2015), which is supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation (Grant GEO-0452325).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Instituto Multidisciplinario de Biología Vegetal (IMBIV) and Cátedra de Recursos Naturales y Gestión Ambiental, Licenciatura en Geografía, Facultad de Filosofía y Humanidades, Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Casilla de Correo 495, Córdoba, 5000, Argentina

    Marcelo R. Zak

  2. IMBIV, Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas and Facultad de Ciencias Exactas, Físicas y Naturales, Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Casilla de Correo 495, Córdoba, 5000, Argentina

    Marcelo Cabido & Sandra Díaz

  3. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas and Facultad de Ciencias Agropecuarias, Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Casilla de Correo 509, Córdoba, 5000, Argentina

    Daniel Cáceres

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  1. Marcelo R. Zak
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Correspondence to Marcelo R. Zak.

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Zak, M.R., Cabido, M., Cáceres, D. et al. What Drives Accelerated Land Cover Change in Central Argentina? Synergistic Consequences of Climatic, Socioeconomic, and Technological Factors. Environmental Management 42, 181–189 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00267-008-9101-y

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