Potential land use determination from geospatial modeling of agroecological and forestvariables of an environmental protection area located in the Central South Region of Mexico

Abstract

The degradation of land in protected natural areas in Mexico is caused to a great extent by the irrational behavior of society on these geographic spaces, along with the lack of design, instrumentation, and regulation of management policies. Based on this reality, the objective of this research was to determine the potential land use through the geospatial modeling of agroecological and forest variables of the administrative territory of the Otomí-Mexica Park of the State of Mexico. To this end, the following methodology was designed: a) selection of agroecological and forest variables according to the geographical characteristics of the territory; b) weighting of variables using the Scoring method; c) geospatial modeling of variables using superposition methods in geographic information systems (GIS) environments; and d) information validation. The results show that, according to the modeling of the territorial variables, the administrative space of the park is adequate to develop activities related to forest development in more than 85% of its land area.