Application of the ESA-CCI land cover maps dataset at 300 m spatial resolution to assess Nicaragua’s agrarian frontier geospatial trend at the country-level and biosphere reserve-level
Description
The encroachment of the agrarian frontier constitutes Nicaragua’s biggest environmental challenge as the major cause of complex processes of ecosystems degradation. I use the ESA-CCI land cover maps dataset and the UNCCD land cover classes (UNCCD-LC) to estimate its geospatial trend in terms of land cover changes and transitions at the country-level and the areas encompassing Bosawas and Río San Juan biosphere reserves from 1992 to 2018. The ESA-CCI land cover maps generated at 300 m spatial resolution on an annual basis from 1992 to 2015 in TIF format (raster layers) were collected from the official website of the ESA-CCI (https://www.esa-landcover-cci.org/). The coordinate reference system of the maps is a geographic coordinate system based on the World Geodetic System 84 (WGS84) reference ellipsoid. The processing of the geospatial data was carried out using QGIS. The 36 ESA-CCI land cover classes (CCI-LC) were re-classified to the 7 UNCCD-LC (i.e., tree-covered, grassland, cropland, wetland, artificial, other land, and water body). The ESA-CCI land cover maps were clipped to the country-level (Nicaragua) using the vector layers in SHP format collected from the official website of GADM (https://gadm.org/), and at the biosphere reserve-level (Bosawas y Río San Juan) using the vector layers in SHP format collected from the official website of Protected Planet (https://www.protectedplanet.net/). A pixel count approach was used to estimate each UNCCD-LC area. STATA was used to calculate UNCCD-LC area estimates in squared kilometers, each pixel counting for 300 m x 300 m which is the ESA-CCI land cover maps spatial resolution.
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Steps to reproduce
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