Drivers of land use and land cover changes in South America: A review focused on drylands

Abstract

In South America studies on the expansion and retraction of agricultural activity in drylands have been widely disseminated although not always linked to the spatialisation of land use change. Much of the literature from Rural Geography, Rural Sociology or Anthropology—among other academic fields—analyses the economic and political causes of such advances of the agricultural frontier, agricultural crises and agrarian conflicts, market behaviours, problems of peasants and producers and disputes over water and forest use, but do not always include cartographic and statistical analyses of land use changes.3,4 Despite the explanatory depth in social, economic, politicaland cultural terms, it is usual—in this type of literature—to find nongeoreferenced information and observe cartographic sources that it is not always possible to compare accurately with each other. Focused on the analysis on drylands, the main searched literature was the one that analyses the fluctuations of the uses of irrigated and nonirrigated areas. The aim is to answer those questions as part of a larger project—which even covers other regions of the Americas. To achieve the latter, publications originated in South America were surveyed, according to the perspective of driving forces, linking actors and structure, and overcoming the rift between society and nature.