Use pressure of the urban commons at metropolitan areas: Case of "boca maule" wetland in chile

Abstract

There are urban dynamics favored by a market-centered urban development model, which in recent decades have pressed the natural ecosystems of the metropolitan areas of Chile, degrading these urban commons and generating environmental conflicts. We study the case of the Boca Maule estuary basin south of the Metropolitan Area of Concepción (AMC), the city of Coronel, which has accelerated urbanization patterns since the 1990s. This basin houses a wetland of high ecological interest, both for its extension, biodiversity and for its environmental fragility. Here we evaluate the changes in soil cover between 2001 and 2016, through supervised classification of satellite images. We can see the reduction of the surface of the wetland, which has been replaced by residential, industrial and road infrastructure, as well as exotic plantations. These processes trigger aggressive competition over time for the uses between two coverage that produce an enclosure effect on each other: Wetland-Urban Land and Wetland-Forest.