Evaluating Land Cover Change on the Island of Santa Cruz, Galapagos Archipelago of Ecuador Through Cloud-Gap Filling and
Human migration and tourism in the Galapagos archipelago have rapidly increased since the 1980s. Accordingly, several Galapagos islands have experienced significant urban and agricultural development. Despite such dynamics, land cover map products current
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n Tropical islands are vitally important ecosystems that support high biological diversity and productivity as well as contributing significantly to human societies (Walsh & Mena, 2013). The Galapagos Archipelago is well known for its natural beauty, history, diverse wildlife, and conservation efforts. Santa Cruz, San Cristobal, and Isabela Islands in the Galapagos Archipelago of Ecuador are among the most popular tourist attractions in the world. Since 1991, the annual number of visitors to the Archipelago increased by 9% per year (Epler, 2007), and an estimate of over 220,000 tourists visited Galapagos in 2015 (Izurieta, 2017). Partly due to growing tourism and related job opportunities, population growth rates in the previous two decades remained high at around 6.4% per year, mainly driven by migration from mainland Ecuador (Baine, Howard, Kerr, Edgar, & Toral, 2007; Epler, 2007). Human migration and tourism have already affected fragile and sensitive islands (Brewington, Frizzelle, Walsh, Mena, & Sampedro, 2014 and are increasingly impacting island ecosystems with the introduction of invasive plant species (Tye, 2001; Walsh et al., 2008). In addition, community expansion and infrastructure development further disturb the natural environment as a consequence of population migration of tourists and residents (Benítez, Mena, & Zurita-Arthos, 2018; Walsh et al., 2010). Despite such dynamics, land cover map products currently available for the Galapagos Islands are limited in both spatial and temporal extents (Benítez et al., 2018; McCleary, 2013). The global land cover maps derived from the Moderate Y. Shao (*) · H. Wan · A. Rosenman · L. M. Kennedy Department of Geography, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, USA e-mail: [email protected] F. J. Laso Department of Geography, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 S. J. Walsh et al. (eds.), Land Cover and Land Use Change on Islands, Social and Ecological Interactions in the Galapagos Islands, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43973-6_7
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Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) have a spatial resolution of 500- m, a scale inadequate for detailed characterization of tropical island landscapes. The effort of 30-m resolution global land cover mapping has major challenges for tropical areas (Yu, Liu, Zhao, Yu, & Gong, 2018). For example, we observed that recently available 30-m FROM-GLC (Finer Resolution Observation and Monitoring of Global Land Cover) map products (Gong et al., 2013) have a high classification error rate for the Galapagos Islands. Most local land cover mapping efforts focus only on a selected portion of the Galapagos Islands due to limited image availability due to cloud cover. For a selected intensive study area on Isabela Island, Walsh et al. (2008) classified high spatial resolution QuickBird data using Object-Based Image Analysis to characterize invasive plant species. McCleary (2013) evaluated land use/cover change in southern Isabela Island, Galapagos, between 200
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