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In Córdoba, Argentina, the peri-urban horticulture is in conflict with industrial agriculture and urban development. This problem is partly due to urban expansion to rural areas occurred in the last years and to monoculture farming, which has replaced traditional fruit and vegetable cropping in the region. This transformation process has raised concern about the current and future availability of productive sectors that can sustain food supply within the city boundaries and its immediate surroundings as well as about the loss of ecosystem services associated with peri-urban natural environments. Although these dynamic processes are well known, they have not been described or quantified in Córdoba. Baseline information about land use and its dynamics in productive areas or about number of producers is insufficient and/or out of date. At O-AUPA (Spanish acronym for Observatory of Urban and Peri-urban Agriculture and Agroecology) different mapping strategies are developed to contribute to the understanding of the land dynamics in the Green Belt of Córdoba (GBC) and the rural environments surrounding the city. In this work, we present a method based on the use of remote sensing and geographical information systems to characterize urban, peri-urban and rural areas of Córdoba city with the aim of evaluating the temporal dynamics of urban growth and the current state of land use and cover. We mapped and quantified the urban growth between 1974 and 2014, and evaluated land use in peri -urban and rural areas in 2015. We used satellite information from Landsat TM 5 to map the urban growth via a principal component analysis (PCA) and SPOT 5 imagery to characterize the current land use and land cover with the support vector machine classification algorithm. The results show an urban area growth of 46.5% over almost 40 years within the boundaries of the Capital department. Farm plot size increased, showing a concentration of land ownership, implying a reduced number of producers. Evidence indicates the importance of defining land planning guidelines that limit the advance of the urban frontier to valuable agricultural systems, ensure diversification of productive activities and protect and develop the fresh food production systems at the local level. DOI: 10.14302/issn.2639-3166.jar-19-2785 Freely Available Online www.openaccesspub.org | JAR CC-license DOI : 10.14302/issn.2639-3166.jar-19-2785 Vol-2 Issue 1 Pg. no. 30 Introduction Land use planning, is a crucial process that requires that social actors assemble knowledge of the strategic variables generated by the complex dynamics and changes in the biophysical, socioeconomic, cultural, technological, and political situation in a territory. Awareness of the current situation is not enough; rather, it is also necessary to understand the temporal dynamics: the historical process, the current situation and the trending scenarios. Likewise, there is also a need to articulate the different scales and dimensions operating in a territory, from the local to the global scales, from the microbiological level to scenarios such as climate change, from the rationale of the internal market to decisions made outside the region, in the international markets, which influence the local responses [1]. Among the biophysical variables, land use and land cover type (agricultural and natural) require an accurate analysis of their spatial and temporal distribution, which evidences the production rate in a region and agroecosystem stability and capacity to provide ecosystem services [2]. Land use planning requires generating diverse databases to support relevant decisions about planning and land use management. Land use planning aims at achieving a fairer and more efficient territorial distribution in terms of opportunities for development, shaping the relationships between the territory and its users, and linking human, productive and spatial activities, with the ultimate goal of improving life quality of present and future generations [3]. Urban growth, distribution of the population in the urban and rural settings, the impact of rapid city expansion on the provision of ecosystem goods and services, and the agricultural expansion processes appear to be the dominant factors in land use changes worldwide [4] [5]. Many strategies are well known for the purpose of mapping and analyzing the urban-rural transformation processes. Remote sensing and Geographical information Systems (GIS) are the main tools for providing local, regional and global historical databases. As part of the fast growing computational capabilities and storage, digital image processing is becoming more accessible with the more reliable digital processing techniques [6]. In Argentina, Córdoba was one of the first provinces to exhibit expansion of annual crops in the 90s, as indicated by the agricultural censuses. This phenomenon has caused profound biophysical, socioeconomic and cultural transformations in the territory [7] [8]. The consequences of agricultural and urban expansion in the urban-rural interface of the main cities of Córdoba, however, are still less understood. The peri-urban area, historically known as the “Green Belt of Córdoba” (GBC), has the typical characteristics of a rapid, uncontrolled and scarcely planned urban growth at the expense of the surrounding agricultural land, neglecting the importance of local food production. That process has been largely promoted by the real estate boom and industrial expansion to areas that had been traditionally used for fruit and vegetable production [9]. Small and medium-sized producers have witnessed the transformation of their environment driven by interests other than food production (great part of that urban and agricultural expansion has been driven by short-term economic benefits, disregarding the associated social, economic and environmental costs). Corresponding author: Nicolás A. Mari, Instituto Nacional de Tecnología Agropecuaria Agencia de Extensión Rural Cruz del Eje, Email: mari.nicolas@inta.gob.ar

Mapping and Characterizing the Green Belt of Córdoba: Land Dynamics and the Urban-Rural Transformation Process