In the megadiverse tropical mountain forest in the Andes of southern Ecuador, a global biodiversity hotspot, the use of fire to clear land for cattle ranching is leading to the invasion of an aggressive weed, the bracken fern, which is threatening diversity and the provisioning of ecosystem services. To find sustainable land use options adapted to the local situation, a profound knowledge of the long-term spatiotemporal patterns of land cover change and its drivers is necessary, but hitherto lacking. The complex topography and the high cloud frequency make the use of remote sensing in this area a challenge. To deal with these conditions, we pursued specific pre-processing steps before classifying five Landsat scenes from 1975 to 2001. Then, we quantified land cover changes and habitat fragmentation, and we investigated landscape changes in relation to key spatial elements (altitude, slope, and distance from roads). Good classification results were obtained with overall accuracies ranging from 94.5% to 98.5% and Kappa statistics between 0.75 and 0.98. Forest was strongly fragmented due to the rapid expansion of the arable frontier and the even more rapid invasion by bracken. Unexpectedly, more bracken-infested areas were converted to pastures than vice versa, a practice that could alleviate pressure on forests if promoted. Road proximity was the most important spatial element determining forest loss, while for bracken the altitudinal range conditioned the degree of invasion in deforested areas. The annual deforestation rate changed notably between periods: ~1.5% from 1975 to 1987, ~0.8% from 1987 to 2000, and finally a very high rate of ~7.5% between 2000 and 2001. We explained these inconstant rates through some specific interrelated local and national political and socioeconomic drivers, namely land use policies, credit and tenure incentives, demography, and in particular, a severe national economic and bank crisis.

Sustainable intensification of agricultural lands might reconcile the conservation of tropical forest with food production, but in-depth assessments considering uncertainty and extreme values are missing. Uncertainty prohibits mapping probabilities to potential future states or ranking these states in terms of their likelihood. This in turn hampers the assessment of possible decision outcomes. Here, we use simulations to investigate how uncertainty may influence the social acceptability of alternative land-use strategies to halt tropical deforestation (including sustainable intensification), based on indicators representing farmer satisfaction. The results show how extreme values (worst values) for indicators of farmer satisfaction may undermine the adoption of sustainable intensification. We demonstrate that a pure forest conservation strategy leads to lower food production, but outperforms a sustainable intensification strategy that maintains food security. Pure forest conservation performed better, i.e., could secure higher farmer satisfaction, than sustainable intensification across a range of indicator groups. This suggests strong barriers to achieving sustainable intensification. Using agricultural subsidies breaks the dominance of pure forest conservation by enhancing the economic returns of sustainable intensification. We discuss the importance of access to labor and farmers’ preferences for the use of already cleared lands, which achieved the worst values under sustainable intensification and conclude that any assessment of land-use strategies requires careful consideration of uncertainty and extreme values.

While an increase in the size and number of conservation areas is expected as part of global environmental commitments, at the same time, Protected Area Downgrading, Downsizing, and Degazettement, or PADDD, is becoming more frequent worldwide. This paper analyzes the causal relationships between land claims and human settlements on the one hand and the downsizing process of a protective forest in southeastern Ecuador on the other. Industrial-scale commodity production, extraction, infrastructure development, and local land claims or existence of human settlements constitute the main drivers, but a deeper understanding of PADDD causality requires detailed documentation of the history of PA growth and loss. We analyzed official documents, conducted qualitative research through semi-structured interviews with stakeholders, and carried out a thematic analysis. We found that institutional and legal changes at the national level drive downsizing, and that local demands to land titles are a proximate cause. Our analysis demonstrates how driver and cause operate in an intertwined, multi-scalar relationship, and concludes that there is a need for more detailed understanding of PADDD causality, either to prevent such events or to define alternative tools, which can replace the idea of having areas with fixed borders to promote conservation, especially in inhabited zones.