Land cover changes and ecosystem services at the Negro River Basin, Argentina: what is missing for better assessing nature’s contribution?

Abstract

Ecosystem services are critical to sustaining human activity on freshwater systems since food, energy, and water provision directly depends on them. Identifying and monitoring ecosystem services can contribute to a better understanding of basin dynamics and, consequently, improve the results of resource management along the watersheds. In turn, ecosystem services provision is continuously subject to natural and anthropogenic stressors, among which land cover changes play a crucial role. The Negro is a river entirely located in Argentinean territory, and its basin constitutes one of the largest and most complex watersheds of the country. This paper characterized the Negro River basin, analyzed land cover changes in the area between the years 1992 and 2015, and determined its impact over the value of the ecosystem services in the watershed. Our results indicate that not only the land cover in the Negro River basin has remained relatively unchanged during the period under study, but also the value of ecosystem services exhibits only a slight decrease according to the traditional value transfer. Despite this, the contribution of nature to socioeconomic development in the area seems to be substantially higher when considering other factors excluded from the traditional analysis of ecosystem services, such as the exploitation of non-renewable resources and their production chains. In this context, we discussed the usefulness of the performed analysis in this particular basin, which has suffered a profound and fast socioeconomic transformation related to the oil and gas production during last years and pointed out some guidelines to assess better the contribution of nature to socioeconomic development in similar cases.