Functional and structural landscape indicators of intensification, resilience and resistance in agroecosystems in southern Argentina based on remotely sensed data

There is increasing interest in developing criteria to evaluate the environmental implications of intensive agricultural land use. This implies discriminating between nature and man-made effects upon structural and functional attributes of agroecosystems. Adequate indicators of these combined effects should be cost efficient yet compatible with the core of ecological theory on biodiversity, spatial organization and ecosystem stability. We developed resistance-resilience metrics of plant growth to evaluate the intensity of agricultural use in a temperate irrigated basin in southern Argentina. The metrics are based on an analysis of the components of a temporal series of vegetation indices computed at a low resolution from available globally remote sensed reflectance imagery. We related the developed metrics to the properties of the soils and plant canopies observed at field scale and high-resolution imagery of the basin. Soil depth, soil erosion status and land fragmentation account for large fractions of the variance of the distribution of functional groups of the plant canopies and are also correlated with smaller scale attributes of land vegetation cover. Resistance-resilience indicators constitute a cost-efficient and adequate approach to evaluate the degree of intensification of land agricultural use.