Abstract

BERLANGA ROBLES, César Alejandro; GARCIA CAMPOS, Rodrigo Ricardo; LOPEZ BLANCO, Jorge  and  RUIZ LUNA, Arturo. Land use and land cover change patterns in the north coast region of Nayarit (1973-2000). Invest. Geog [online]. 2010, n.72, pp.7-22. ISSN 2448-7279.

Landsat satellite imagery from 1973, 1990 and 2000, was classifed and a further post classification comparison, including digital ancillary information, was done to analyze the land cover and land uses changes in the coastal region of northern Nayarit. We produced thematic maps with nine cover and land use classes with overall accuracies > 85% and estimates of Kappa coeficient from 0.85 to 0.99 for the spectral error matrices. For the field-error matrices, the overall accuracies and Kappa estimates were higher than 87 and 0.85%, respectively. The analysis of change-detection matrices (1973-1990, 1990-2000 and 1973-2000) indicate that the general percentage of change for the study area was around 25% for among periods and 30% for the whole period (1973-2000). In all the cases, a positive trend of growth for economic activities (agriculture, shrimp farms and urban use) was detected, as well as a decrease in natural covers such as forests and mangroves, among others.

Keywords : Land cover; land use/cover change; coastal environment; supervised classification; error matrices; change analysis; Kappa index; Nayarit.

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