Spontaneous Colonization and Forest Fragmentation in the Central Amazon Basin
This article addresses the emergence of road networks and forest fragmentation in Central Amazônia, which has been impacted by both spontaneous and planned settlement. The first objective of the article is to broaden the discussion of fragmentation by addressing social processes
that generate it through the construction of roads. Roads impact land cover change worldwide, and their role in Amazonian deforestation is known. The article also seeks to extend the literature on roads to address the social processes and individual behaviors that create the road network architecture.
The second objective is to open a discussion about the biodiversity implications of different patterns of forest fragmentation. Our specific focus is the geometry of settlement associated with urban nodes, referred to here as radial fragmentation. The article pursues its objectives
by implementing a conceptual framework that extends the pattern-to-process paradigm of landscape ecology by adding a (social) process-to-pattern component. This is accomplished through a mixed-method approach including (1) field-based narratives of the social processes that gave rise to radial
fragmentation in the hinterland of the town of Itaituba, an important settlement in the middle Tapajós valley; (2) remote sensing of the evolution of road networks, which we then link to deforestation in a temporal analysis of emergent fragmentation patterns; and (3) computational applications
to compare the biodiversity implications of radial and fishbone landscape fragmentation.
Keywords: ciencia de sistemas terrestres; deforestación; deforestation; ecología del paisaje; land systems science; landscape ecology; proceso a patrón; process to pattern; red de carreteras; road network
Document Type: Research Article
Affiliations: 1: Department of Geography and the Environment, The University of Texas at Austin, 2: Department of Geography, Michigan State University, 3: Instituto do Homem e Meio Ambiente da Amazônia, Brazil 4: Núcleo de Meio Ambiente, Universidade Federal do Pará, Brazil
Publication date: 01 November 2013
- Access Key
- Free content
- Partial Free content
- New content
- Open access content
- Partial Open access content
- Subscribed content
- Partial Subscribed content
- Free trial content