Blog 2:

 ENVIRONMENTAL PROBLEMS FOUND IN THE COUNTRY WHERE I WAS BORN (Argentina):

INTRODUCTION:

                                                                                 

           

Among the different regions of Argentina, the Pampean Region shows the greatest signs of human intervention.  This region comprises an important geographic economic area that occupies approximately 60 million hectares and extends into sectors of five provinces: Santa Fé, Entre Ríos, Córdoba, La Pampa and Buenos Aires.  In addition, it centralizes between 80% and 90% of the country's cereal and oilseed production and more than 50% of the total population. Some regions, such as the Argentine Pampean Region, have a marked aptitude to provide agricultural services with tangible market value, such as grains, meat, milk, vegetable and animal fibers, raw materials, among others. .  Due to the favorable ecological conditions for this type of activities, the Pampean grasslands have been strongly replaced by agriculture and livestock, and show, in addition to a significant level of degradation, a low degree of conservation. This process has increased in recent decades as a consequence of intense agro-productive changes associated with the advance of the agricultural frontier.  In this way, the expansion process called "agriculturization" is defined as the continuous and increasing use of land for agricultural crops instead of livestock or mixed uses and is associated with technological changes, livestock intensification, expansion of the agricultural frontier and development of productions oriented to monoculture, mainly soybeans, or the wheat-soybean combination. 

        

The main effects of Argentine agriculture on the environment include soil degradation, contamination with agrochemicals, deforestation, loss of biodiversity, greenhouse gas emissions and problems derived from the use of blue water. .

The ecological conditions of the Pampas grasslands favored the expansion of agriculture. The aim of this paper is to analyze the changes of land use and environmental consequences in Benito Juarez County, located in the Southern Pampas, Argentina, for the period 2003- 2011.To do this, a supervised classification of Landsat 5 images was performed. The images were processed from the Software ENVI 4.5, to establish "classes of land use". The results show that in 2003, livestock occupies the highest percentage of the County land use (71.09 %), while in 2011 these areas occupy a 52.58 %. During the period an expansion of agriculture (82.48 %) is observed, which results in the decrease of livestock uses (26.10%). The environmental impacts of these changes are the pollution from agrochemicals use, habitat fragmentation, weed resistance, as well as the unequal land concentration and social inequality. In this context, it is considered essential to generate an environmental diagnosis of the County in order to reverse the critical issues that affect the sustainability of ecosystems. Key - words: agriculturization, land use, supervised classification, environmental impacts, environmental diagnosis.