Spatial and temporal variation of human appropriation of net primary production in the Rio de la Plata grasslands
Introduction
Net Primary Productivity (NPP) (rate of biomass accumulation per unit area) is one of the most important and integrative ecosystem attributes since it determines the amount of energy available for subsequent trophic levels (Lindeman, 1942, Odum, 1971). Increase in world population and consumption has led to land use intensification with increases in both, cultivated area and crop productivity per unit area. Crops and pastures cover 38% of the world's free ice surface (Ramankutty et al., 2008, Monfreda et al., 2008). At the same time, crop yields have increased in recent years (Foley et al., 2011, Zhang and Zhang, 2016). While cultivated areas increased around 12% over the last 40 years, agricultural production more than doubled in the same period, mainly through fertilization, irrigation, high-yielding varieties and mechanization (Foley et al., 2007).
The Human Appropriation of Net Primary Production (HANPP) concept incorporates both aspects of agricultural intensification, increases in cultivated area and increases in crop yield. HANPP quantifies the portion of ecosystems NPP used directly or indirectly by humans (Vitousek et al., 1986), and it reflects the changes in available energy for the trophic web (Field, 2001). Additionally, several works have shown the relationship between HANPP and biodiversity (Wright, 1990, Haberl, 1997, Haberl et al., 2004), changes in atmospheric composition (DeFries et al., 1999, Schimel, 2000) water cycles (Gerten et al., 2005), or the provision of ecosystem services (Daily, 1997, Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 2005). The central role on energy flow and its linkage with other ecosystem processes make HANPP a comprehensive indicator of human impact on ecosystems.
Although research on HANPP has a relatively short history, several studies have quantified it on a global (Wright, 1990, Rojstaczer et al., 2001, Imhoff et al., 2004, Haberl et al., 2007, Krausmann et al., 2013, Zhou et al., 2018), continental (Gingrich et al., 2015, Plutzar et al., 2016); national (Kastner, 2009, Schwarzlmüller, 2009, Fetzel et al., 2014, Niedertscheider et al., 2014, Chen et al., 2015, Saikku and Mattila, 2017, Zhang et al., 2018) or local scales (O’Neill et al., 2007, Andersen et al., 2015, Marull et al., 2018); from a set of definitions related to the ones originally proposed by Vitousek et al. (1986). As far as we know there are no regional works that calculates HANPP for a whole biome.
The Río de la Plata Grasslands (RPG) are one of largest areas of natural temperate sub-humid grasslands in the world (Soriano, 1991, Paruelo et al., 2007). They occupy more than 70 × 106 ha in southern South America, including the Pampas in Argentina and the Campos in Uruguay and southern Brazil. The RPG are one of the world's most fertile areas, most of which are suitable for agriculture and have been subjected in recent years to one of the highest rates of land use change in the world (Graesser et al., 2015, Volante et al., 2015, Baeza, 2016).
In this article we evaluated land use change impacts on energy flow in the RPGs using HANPP as a comprehensive indicator. We calculated the HANPP for the entire RPG region and its changes over time, in a period of intense land use changes. Calculations were based on land cover maps and NPP estimates derived from sub-national level agricultural statistics and modeling of remotely sensed data. We specifically addressed the following questions: How did ecosystems carbon gains vary in response to land use changes?, how did carbon gains changed over time?, how much of the C fixed in the RPG was appropriated by humans? and, how does the HANPP vary in time and space?
Section snippets
Area and period studied
The study area corresponded to the RPG (Soriano,1991). In a previous work we mapped 7 land use/land cover (LULC) categories: Perennial Forage Resources (PFR), Winter Crops (WC), Summer Crops (SC) Double Crops (DC), Afforested areas and native Forests (A&F), Water and Urban, at annual intervals from 2000/2001 to 2013/2014 (Baeza, 2016). The last two categories were superimposed on all final maps, so they did not vary over time. In this article we used maps of 2 growing seasons 2001/2002 and
Net Primary production of potential vegetation (NPN0)
Total NPP0 (the NPP that would exist in the absence of human disturbances, assuming that the entire study area was covered by native grasslands) in the RPG was higher (F(1, 8965) = 5124, p < 0.001; X2(1, 8965) = 3388, p < 0.001) in 2001/2002, where it reached 9.70 × 1011 kgDM year−1, than in 2012/2013, where it reached 8.68 × 1011 kgDM year−1 (approximately 100 TgDM year−1 less), with average values for grid cells of 12930 and 11563 kgDM ha−1 year-1 for 2001/2002 and 2012/2013 respectively.
Discussion
We documented the human impact on the energy flow over the Rio de la Plata grasslands both in terms of the relative importance of different components of the human appropriation of the NPP and in the amount of NPP remaining in the systems. Previous estimates described patterns of HANPP at the scale of countries provided global figures. Our study went a step further providing a comprehensive and fine grained description of HANPP patterns over an entire biogeographycal region.
In contrast to other
Acknowledgements
This work was supported on doctoral fellowships for ANII and CAP-UdelaR, Uruguay (Baeza); by a grant from the Inter-American Institute for Global Change Research (IAI) CRN3095 which is supported by the US National Science Foundation (Grant GEO-1128040) and by FONCYT, CONICET and UBACYT (Argentina).
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2022, Perspectives in Ecology and ConservationCitation Excerpt :The “Rio de la Plata Grasslands” is the largest grassland region in South America (more than 70 million ha) (Soriano, 1991) and it has been transformed into cropland at high rates since the beginning of the 20th century (Hall et al., 1992). Due to technological changes and raised international market demands, agricultural expansion has increased markedly in the last three decades (Baeza and Paruelo, 2018, 2020; Baldi and Paruelo, 2008). Although transformation to agricultural land has allowed the provision of food and fiber, it has had a great impact on the provision of other still undervalued ecosystem services that depend on grasslands, such as carbon storage, soil generation, nutrient cycling, among others (Baeza and Paruelo, 2018; Sala and Paruelo, 1997; Texeira et al., 2019; Viglizzo et al., 2011).
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2022, Ecological IndicatorsCitation Excerpt :Additionally, remote sensing-based NPP estimation and analysis of large areas is more effective than field measurement methods (Zhu et al., 2006). The introduction of remote sensing data, such as NOAA/AVHRR and EOS/MODIS, has strongly promoted research on vegetation NPP remote sensing models and the application of related data products (Mohamed et al., 2004; Prieto-Blanco et al., 2009; Bandaru et al., 2013; Wu et al., 2014; Baeza and Paruelo, 2018). In terms of estimation models, because its structure is simple and the parameters can be obtained through remote sensing data, the Carnegie-Ames-Stanford Approach (CASA) based on the principle of vegetation light energy efficiency is one of the most promising research methods and is widely used in NPP estimation research at global and regional scales (Field et al., 1995; Seixas et al., 2009; Chen et al., 2020; Yan et al., 2021).
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Current address: Instituto Nacional de Investigaciones Agropecuarias, La Estanzuela, Ruta 50 km 11, Colonia, Uruguay.