Funding Source: CONICET
PIEU Institutional Project of “Unidad ejecutora”.
Summary
In Northwest Argentina, land-use and land cover change will be related with the functioning of the novel ecosystems, providing tools for the planification and land governance in the context of global changes.
Specifically,
- We will update the description of the patterns of agriculture-cattle ranching expansion and the changes in the structure of Chaco forests, coupling them with species distribution models, and biomass models. We will evaluate pollination and pest-control services in soybean crops in relation with landscape configuration; and agriculture sustainability trends and their relation with hydrology. We will generate land optimization models under future scenarios, according to global drivers.
- We will analyze forest dynamics and plant-animal interactions in the Yungas, at different altitudinal levels, in contexts of agriculture and cattle ranching des intensification, invasion by exotic species, climate change, and fire-regime changes.
- We will model the geographic patterns of biodiversity and carbon in the vegetation, wetlands and agroecosystems of the Puna and Altos Andes, combining future scenario models with the monitoring of vegetation permanent plots.
- We will develop an environmental monitoring system in cities and urban-rural interfaces; combining the acquisition of data with automatized sensors, and pollutants.
- We will contextualize socio-ecological and land changes in Northwest Argentina with the demographic and land use and land cover trends in Latin America. We will integrate the results from objectives 1-4 to generate spatiotemporal models of socioecological units in Northwest Argentina.
- We will promote co-design processes of land system research based on (i) environmental open-access data: (ii) advances courses for facilitating data analyses applied to regional priority themes; and (iii) workshops with decision-makers.
