Humanity’s footprint in Ecuador now covers more than 30% of the country’s total area, at the expense of coastal ecosystems, the Andes, and forests across the country. But it’s the Amazon Rainforest that has seen the most losses over the past nearly 40 years, according to new research by local environmental NGOs EcoCiencia and MapBiomas Ecuador with other independent investigators. Where the Andes meets the Amazon in Ecuador. Image by Rhett A. Butler / Mongabay. The researchers analyzed satellite images between 1985 and 2022 and found that Ecuador lost 1.16 million hectares (nearly 2.9 million acres) of natural land cover during this period. This includes the reduction or disappearance of glaciers, and more direct human-induced changes like increasing agriculture, forestry, aquaculture and mining. The researchers also created an interactive map of their results to show this transition over time. “For Ecuador, since it’s a small country, this is a significant area,” said remote-sensing analyst Maria Olga Borja from EcoCiencia, who coordinates mapping initiatives with MapBiomas and the Amazon Georeferenced Socio-Environmental Information Network (RAISG). “Half of these transformations are happening where most of our forests are, so I think we should be looking into that more deeply,” Borja, an Ecuadorian native, told Mongabay in a video call. The report analyzed five biomes — the Galápagos Islands, the Amazon, the Andes, the coastal Pacific tropical rainforest, and the equatorial dry forests — to see where natural vegetation cover had changed and why. It found that forestry activity increased by 77% in the…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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