Abstract

FONTURBEL, Francisco E.. Evaluation of the loss of the chaqueño dry forest coverage in torotoro's municipality and in torotoro national park (Potosí, Bolivia), through remote sensing. Ecol. apl. [online]. 2007, vol.6, n.1-2, pp.59-66. ISSN 1726-2216.

Vegetation coverage of chaqueño dry forest in Torotoro National Park (Potosí, Bolivia) and Torotoro Municipality (which includes the National Park) was evaluated using remote sensing. I worked with two satellite images, a Landsat 5 TM from 1990 and a Landsat 7 ETM+ from 2001, both images were geometrically corrected, a normalized vegetation index was applied and a supervised classification was performed to distinguish "forest" from "matrix" categories. Classifications were fitted to the National Park’s and Municipality’s perimeters in ArcView, converted into vector format and a fragment analysis was performed in order to determine landscape, edge, shape, distance and core area metrics. Results show that 6 449 hectares of dry forest were lost from the forest in Municipality’s area between 1990 and 2001, despite the fact that no total area significant differences were found, a clear tendency of average patch area reduction and an increase of patch numbers is evident between 1990 and 2001. Although yearly deforestation rates were relatively low (~2% per year), forest habitat fragmentation and loss are a long-term threat to conservation of the biota associated with this forest.

Keywords : Torotoro National Park; Potosí; remote sensing; fragment analysis; conservation.

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