Land-use and biodiversity in the Chaco - Project overview
Workplan of the project
To assess recent land use changes and the trade-offs between agricultural production and biodiversity in the Argentine Chaco, we will apply an interdisciplinary approach, bridging geography, remote sensing, and spatial ecology, and we will bring together a team of international researchers.
Our approach will consist of five work packages (Fig. 1):
First, we will make full use of the Landsat image archive to generate so-called image composites which allow for large-area mapping of land change. Second, we will use those composites to reconstruct land use change for the Argentine Chaco. Third, we will carry out a rapid bird community assessment and derive a range of community level indicators pertaining to alpha and beta-diversity. Fourth, we will statistically explore the relationship of bird community indicators and environmental, land use, and human disturbance variables to understand the effects of land use change on biodiversity. Finally, we will assess the trade-offs among agricultural production and biodiversity across a gradient of land use intensity.
Fig. 1: Overview of the workflow of the project.