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1. Introduction
Both planned and unplanned land use change is a significant threat to protected areas, biodiversity and the continued provision of important ecosystem services to society. It is
estimated that the human footprint has affected 83 of the global terrestrial land surface Sanderson et al., 2003 and has degraded about 60 of the ecosystems services in the past 50
years alone MEA, 2005. Global trends indicate that agricultural commodities produced for international markets have increasing weight in tropical landscapes as drivers of land-use and
land cover changes.
Amazonia contains the world’s most extensive tropical forest ecosystem and accounts for more land-use change than any other region in the world. Yet deforestation continues at an alarming
rate, making the status of the forest one of the most important issues for consideration in land- use change studies for the entire region.
Decision-makers at multiple scales local - national - regional are eager to get information on land-use change, requiring the information to be as accurate and up-to-date as possible, in order
to prioritize interventions and respond quickly to new land-use change patterns. Furthermore, decision makers need accurate information to use in the design of more efficient and sustainable
development programs that integrate the environment as a key component for their
implementation. The main goal of this report is to provide a brief summary of land-use change in Amazonia
within the focus countries of Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru. This report will mainly focus on the analysis and discussion of land-use change status and trends since 1970’s, a
period when considerable changes started to be evident. Analyses were supported from a literature review and land use databases and maps for Andean countries CIAT and Brazil
INPE. Additionally, data available from the Terra-i tool, the first habitat-loss tracking system
for Latin America, was used to analyze the critical changes in land-use cover reported by several authors in the last decade 2000 to present date.
Annex 1 describes the Terra-i methodology applied for the assessment of land-use change in Amazonia during the eight year period 2004-2011. In addition, although Terra-i is not currently
able to specify directly the land-use change for each detected loss, by examining data at the biome and ecoregion scales it is possible to determine where and to what extent changes in
natural vegetation are occurring, and to better understand the underlying environmental and
social drivers of this change.
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2. An Overview of Amazonia
Kategori