Study of soil bearing capacity in the Río Torres Interurban Biological Corridor, Costa Rica.

Abstract

The soil bearing capacity in the Río Torres Interurban Biological Corridor was estimated employing three surface variables (stoniness, effective depth, and slope), the result indicated unrestricted agricultural and conservation forestland as the predominant categories. Next, land use types existing throughout the corridor were identified by means of the supervised classification of satellite images, which evidenced 53.62% of total area as occupied by urban activities, 25.7% forest coverage and 19.91% destined to livestock grazing and pastures. Soil bearing capacity data and land use visualization allowed the identification of areas with optimal and overexploitation, the latter amounted to 15.21% of the corridor’s total land area. For both types of areas, good forestry practices were defined in order to reduce soil degradation. Finally, forest coverage fragmentation was evaluated and found to exhibit a high degree of segmentation, thus strategies were recommended to reestablish connectivity between isolated fragments.