Tree plantations have expanded rapidly during the last decades, specially in Asia and South America, and Chile has shown one of the largest increases in tree plantations in the world. The aim of this study was to analyze the dynamic and factors statistically associated with the expansion of tree plantations in two coastal basins in south-central Chile. We used logistic regression and a multimodel inference approach to assess the association of 13 location factors with tree plantation expansion in two periods (1987–2001; 2001–2015). The area of tree plantations increased by 292% and 196% in the Budi and Lingue basins, respectively. The presence of agriculture fields before conversion to tree plantations showed the greatest effect in both basins, followed by the suitability of the soil for forestry. Likewise, tree plantations were highly associated with the replacement of native vegetation, contributing to ongoing deforestation, and changes in forest policy increased the expansion in indigenous land.

The expansion of agricultural, forest plantation, and urban areas is among the main drivers of worldwide land use/cover change. However, little is known about the changes in the extent of highly profitable crops in the temperate zones of South America and their association with other land use/cover changes, especially in south-central Chile, which has experienced massive changes in recent decades. In this context, we aimed to assess land use/cover and fruit crop area changes at the regional and county levels in the Araucanía region, Chile. Hence, the quantity and location of past and future changes were identified using cross-tabulation, Markov chains and cellular automata. The results showed that agricultural land and meadows have decreased by 18% and 26%, respectively, between 1997 and 2013, mainly due to the expansion of forest plantations and urban areas. However, the fruit crop area increased by 645% between the years 2000 and 2019 and will continue increasing to 2033. These changes modified the relative weights of economic activities within the region, changing from cattle raising and marginal agriculture to more profitable activities such as fruit crops and forest plantations. Finally, this work shows a need to move toward the spatial monitoring of agriculture and fruit crops within the country.

Los cambios experimentados por las áreas metropolitanas españolas tienen como expresiónespacial transformaciones en los patrones de ocupación del territorio, con motivo de la aparición denuevas formas de expansión urbana. Las métricas espaciales son un conjunto de variables del ámbitodisciplinar de la ecología del paisaje que permiten cuantificar y caracterizar las formas, tamaño y configuraciónde los fragmentos urbanos, pudiendo ser un instrumento útil para caracterizar patrones deocupación urbana y procesos de transformación de un patrón a otro. En este trabajo se presenta una clasificación multitemporal de las áreas metropolitanas españolas empleando para ello la cartografíaCORINE para el período 1990-2018 a partir de la identificación de diversos patrones espaciales, asícomo los procesos de transformación desde unos patrones de ocupación a otros. Los resultados muestranun importante cambio en los patrones, que tienden hacia formas más dispersas y fragmentadas.