Escenarios de la ordenación territorial: modelos prospectivos del uso de suelo en el cantón Cuenca

Abstract

The generation of scenarios for territorial planning through prospective models of land use represents an opportunity to anticipate, prevent, and mitigate unsustainable patterns of consumption and production that territorial development has. This research aims to contribute to the generation of territorial scenarios through the prospective of rural land. The methodology was based on the application of strategic prospective and the CA_Markov model, which is synthesized in a) generation of land cover and land use maps for the years 2000, 2008, and 2018, a1) analysis of changes in land use between the different periods, a2) calculation of transition probability areas (Markov Chain); b) generation of transition suitability maps through identification of change factors, restrictions, fuzzy membership functions (Fuzzy), analytical hierarchy process (AHP) models and multi-criteria evaluation (MCE); c) evaluation of the predictive power of the model through the Kappa index and; d) simulation of scenarios to the year 2030. The 2000-2018 period results indicate a decrease in natural coverage and an increase in anthropic zones and agricultural land. In the scenarios projected for the year 2030, this trend will continue. It is concluded that the space-time analysis for the construction of territorial scenarios represents not only an alternative to understanding the territorial dynamics but also allows to influence it through decision-making based on the technical, academic, planner, and civil society criteria, whose vision allows for achieving sustainable development of the Cuenca canton in the future.