Projecting land-use and land-cover changes in a tropical mountain forest of Southern Ecuador

Thies, B; Meyer, H; Nauss, T; Bendix, J

Zusammenfassung

Land-use and land-cover changes (LULCC) affect local climate. Human-induced deforestation is a common phenomenon of LULCC. This also holds true for the biodiversity hotspot in the Andes of Ecuador. This study assesses the possibility to project LULCC to future time steps with a focus on deforestation in the San Francisco valley in South Ecuador. A business-as-usual scenario based on two Landsat scenes from 1987 and 2001 was created to project LULCC until 2006. The uncertainty assessment indicated the difficulty of projecting human impact on the ecosystem since circumstances of LULCC in the study area cannot be assumed to stay invariant. The projection performs better than a naive model relying on slope as its suitability factor.