Fig 1.
Distribution of the main natural vegetation categories in the Loja and Zamora Chinchipe Provinces in South Ecuador.
Table 1.
Description of the natural vegetation categories used in this study, combining the vegetation classifications proposed for South Ecuador by Balslev & Øllgaard [62], Homeier et al. [63] and Sierra [19].
Table 2.
Confusion matrix obtained from the accuracy assessment of the 2008 land cover map of South Ecuador.
Fig 2.
Land cover maps for the years 1976, 1989, 2008.
Maps display the spatial distribution patterns of the different land cover types in South Ecuador for the three studied years. The black dashed polygons show the boundaries of the protected areas that belong to the national system of protected areas (PANE).
Fig 3.
Annual deforestation rates for different vegetation types in South Ecuador.
Annual deforestation rates in four natural vegetation types in the study area for the periods 1976–1989 and 1989–2008. MEF = Montane evergreen forest, PEF = Premontane evergreen forest, SDF = Seasonally dry forest, SL = Shrubland.
Table 3.
Area covered by different natural forest types, other covers (non-natural covers) and clouds in 1976, 1989 and 2008 in South Ecuador.
Table 4.
Changes of natural vegetation types of other covers in South Ecuador since 1976 to 2008.
Fig 4.
Variation of forest fragment size and total fragment area for 1976, 1989 and 2008.
The figure shows the increase in the number of forest fragments (black bars) and the decreased in the cumulative area of the forest fragments (grey bars) of three different fragment size classes (<1km2, 1–100km2, >100km2) in each studied year.
Table 5.
Changes in spatial configuration of natural forests in South Ecuador during the period from 1976 to 2008.