Fig 1.
Location of the Gran Chaco Phytogeographical region, Cordoba Province, and the study sectors in Argentina. Maps of forest, rangelands and agricultural lands along with their relative percent of cover for the years 1979 and 2010 are also reported.
Fig 2.
Conceptual model used to characterize multi-scale forest fragmentation. Pf and Pff refer to the amount and the structural connectivity of forest, respectively. Regions of the parameter space corresponding to the “interior”, “perforated”, “edge” and “patch” components are marked. Four simple examples of binary landscapes (a–d) are presented and located on the Pf and Pff space for different combinations of amount and structural connectivity: (a) undisturbed interior forest landscape, (b) moderately disturbed forests perforated by unforested gaps (i.e., perforated forests), (c) moderately disturbed forests but with clumped disturbed areas (i.e., edge forest), (d) highly fragmented forest (i.e., patch forests). Green: forests; white: non forests.
Fig 3.
Flowchart representing different steps of the methodology for detecting temporal changes in forest contexts at multiple extents.
Fig 4.
Results of the multi-scale context fragmentation analysis.
Multi-scale forest fragmentation profiles of the analyzed sectors (NE, NW, E) and dates (1979, 2010). Symbol dimensions indicate window sizes and increase from small to large extents. Scalograms describing the average amount of forests (), its standard deviations (σPf) and box-plots describing the statistical distribution of agricultural lands (Pa) and rangelands (Pr) on forest context are also represented.
Table 1.
Descriptive parameters of the scalograms.