Estimación del avance de la frontera agrícola en el corredor ecológico Llanganates – Sangay y análisis multicriterio para la selección estratégica de ubicaciones de biofábricas en Ecuador en el periodo 2023 – 2024

Abstract

The advance of the agricultural frontier is one of the inherent characteristics of the deterioration of forests and protected areas, modifying the usefulness of land use, consequences that are becoming evident within the Llanganates - Sangay Connectivity Corridor (CELS), so in order to analyse and quantify this change, Google Earth Engine was used, platform that with the support of satellite images and the exploration of a large amount of geospatial data, you can generate information with historical data to the most current, so that in this study focused on the creation of areas within the CELS where changes in forest cover have been reflected with the support of the libraries "Hansen Global Forest Change v1. 11 (2000 - 2023)” and “Harmonized Sentinel-2 MSI: MultiSpectral Instrument, Level 2A”, 77% of the parishes are affected, in other words, Carlos Julio Arosemena, Patate, Puyo and Teniente Hugo Ortiz do not show any loss, in addition, the composition of the CELS from 2018 to 2022, corresponds more than 69% to forests, and on the other hand, the Expansion of the Agricultural Frontier, sees its highest point in the year 2022 with a value of 233.57 ha. The implementation of geographic information systems together with multi-criteria analysis make these tools the ideal fusion for problem solving with regard to the difficulty of choosing sites where a work will be carried out or simply where it is necessary to give a utility to the land or area, so that through an interview / workshop, we proceeded with the determination of the criteria to be taken into account to locate the biofactories within the CELS, thus obtaining five key aspects to take into consideration, being these, the core areas, gross loss of forest cover, agricultural activities and proximity to roads, towns and water resources, agricultural activities and proximity to roads, towns and water resources, so that, through a pairwise comparison, the level of importance was determined and with the scale of continuous position, a value was given according to their equivalence in order to apply the Hierarchical Analytical Process, and thus obtain the weights with which to calculate the most suitable places to locate the biofactories, establishing that the sites with the best conditions are those that meet the five criteria, with at least one place in each of the seventeen parishes belonging to CELS.