Land Use Assessment for Proposing Sustainable Development in El Jicaral, Mixteca Region, Mexico

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El Jicaral is an indigenous community of around one thousand inhabitants located in the Municipality of Coicoyán de las Flores, Mixteca Region, Mexico. This region is characterized for being one of the poorest regions in Mexico, with high levels of land degradation, deforestation and water shortages. Even though several studies have been undertaken to estimate the region’s area affected by soil degradation, the findings derived from these studies cannot describe accurately the conditions in the community especially for scale differences, and hence appropriate sustainable farming practices are difficult to be proposed. For this reason, the objective of this study is to assess the present land degradation condition in the study area, using a satellite map obtained from Google Earth and through the overlaying of a mesh, for the identification and classification of several variables, namely vegetation density, slope, steepness and land use, to propose suitable farming practices for mitigating land degradation. The results showed that currently there is a severe degree of soil degradation in the community, reflected in the majority of cells of the mesh with very low and low values of vegetation density, and that most of them were also in slopes up to 16%. Also, it was observed that most of the studied area land use was dedicated for agricultural purposes, even in hillside terrains. So, it is necessary to implement farming systems taking into account this topographic factor, as well as socioeconomic and environmental ones.