Evaluation of recent land-use and land-cover change in a mountain region.

Mountain regions are vital to the provision of ecosystem services. Cofre de Perote volcano is the eighth highest mountain in Mexico and provides various goods and services to the people living in the central region of Veracruz. Despite being a protected area as a national park, it shows processes of landscape change in recent years. We mapped land-use and land-cover changes (LULCC) based on remote sensing data (Sentinel-2) from 2017 and 2021. The best classifier was the support vector machine with an overall accuracy value of 0.908 +/- 0.003 and 0.916 +/- 0.004 for 2017 and 2021, respectively. We estimated that 21.77% of the area changed in only four years. The main trajectory of change was from forests to agricultural, with an area of 1224.81 ha and an annual rate of change of -2.39%. Updating knowledge on the dynamics of LULCC will allow better conservation actions for the mountain ecosystems.

Automated summary

Mountain regions are important for ecosystem services, and Cofre de Perote volcano in Mexico provides goods and services to the people in Veracruz. Despite being a protected national park, it has experienced landscape changes in recent years. We used remote sensing data to map land-use and land-cover changes from 2017 to 2021 and found that 21.77% of the area changed, mainly from forests to agriculture. Updating knowledge on LULCC dynamics will support better conservation actions for mountain ecosystems.