Research Project: Application of the ESA-CCI land cover maps dataset and the UNCCD land cover classes to assess Nicaragua’s agrarian frontier geospatial trend at the country-level and biosphere reserve-level

The advance of the agrarian frontier constitutes Nicaragua’s biggest environmental challenge as the major cause of complex processes of ecosystems degradation. I use the ESA-CCI land cover maps dataset and the UNCCD land cover classes (UNCCD-LC) to estimate its geospatial trend in terms of land cover changes at the country-level and the areas encompassing Bosawas and Río San Juan biosphere reserves from 1992 to 2015. The ESA-CCI land cover maps generated at 300 m spatial resolution on an annual basis from 1992 to 2015 in TIF format (raster layers) were collected from the official website of the ESA-CCI (https://www.esa-landcover-cci.org/). The coordinate reference system of the maps is a geographic coordinate system based on the World Geodetic System 84 (WGS84) reference ellipsoid. The processing of the geospatial data was carried out using QGIS. The 36 ESA-CCI land cover classes (ESA-CCI-LC) were re-classified to the 7 UNCCD-LC (i.e., tree-covered, grassland, cropland, wetland, artificial, other land, and water body). The global-level maps were clipped to the country-level (Nicaragua) using the vector layers in SHP format collected from the official website of GADM (https://gadm.org/), and at the biosphere reserve-level (Bosawas y Río San Juan) using the vector layers in SHP format collected from the official website of Protected Planet (https://www.protectedplanet.net/). A pixel count approach was used to estimate each UNCCD-LC area. STATA was used to calculate UNCCD-LC area estimates in squared kilometers, each pixel counting for 300 m x 300 m which is the ESA-CCI land cover maps spatial resolution. At the country-level, the analysis covered 124,552.2 km2. The total area might include land and water bodies. At the biosphere reserve-level, the analysis covered 19,548.2 km2 for Bosawas and 17,524.9 km2 for Río San Juan. In Basawas biosphere reserve, 41% (8,030.3 km2) of the total area belongs to core areas, whereas 69% (11,548.9 km2) to the buffer zone. In Río San Juan biosphere reserve, 48% (7,525.3 km2) of the total area belongs to core areas, whereas 52% (10,170.2 km2) to the buffer zone. The research finds that Nicaragua’s agrarian frontier has shown a remarkably strong advance during the last two decades, particularly from 1995 to 2007. The underlying land transition process has mainly implied the transformation of tree-covered into cropland or grassland areas. This process has also penetrated legally designated protected areas such as Bosawas and Río San Juan biosphere reserves.