| In the Río de la Plata grasslands (RPG) biogeographical region of South America, agricultural activities have undergone important changes during the last 15–18 years because of technological improvements and new national and international market conditions. We characterized changes in the landscape structure between 1985–1989 and 2002–2004 for eight pilot areas distributed across the main regional environmental gradients. These areas incorporated approximately 35% of the 7.5 × 105 km² of the system. Our approach involved the generation of land-use and land cover maps, the analysis of landscape metrics, and the computation of annual transition probabilities between land cover types. All of the... |
