Mapping unequal accessibility to habitat quality

Being Latin America and the Caribbean amongst the most urbanized regions in the world, during the 60s and 70s of the 20th century, Colombia's urban growth was fueled mainly by migration from the countryside to the city due to violence (Universidad Externado de Colombia 2007). Since then, the city has experienced substantial growth and spread westward.

It is estimated that at the beginning of the 20 ^th  century, the area occupied by lakes and wetlands was more than 50.000 hectares. However, around 700 hectares remain today being 17 ecosystems recognized by the city's Environment Secretariat, of which 11 are under the Ramsar convention.

Bearing in mind that these transition ecosystems provide ecosystem services (ES) such as wastewater treatment, water cycle, and temperature regulation, carbon dioxide reduction, recreation, and ecotourism, which are beneficial to society, assessing the accessibility and equal distribution of them is important for an improved urban planning and development.

Therefore, our study uses the definition of inequality as a positive description of the variance in the distribution and access to an ES.

Two input land use land cover maps for 2010 (left), and 2022 (right) were used.

Besides the LUCC maps, the model requires threats data, the maximum distance over which each threat affects the habitats, the relative impact weight of each threat, the type of decay over space of each threat, and the sensitivity of each land use class to the threats. The previous parameters were determined from a literature review and expert knowledge (Jiang et al., 2012).

Also, we used some variables of the Multipurpose survey for 2010 and 2022 to calculate the quality of life index.

The habitat quality (HQ) results show different spatial patterns in the study area. Visually Habitat degradation is higher where anthropogenic concentration is highest. On the contrary, HQ values are higher in the peripheral wetlands of the study area ( Tibanica ,  Tunjo ,  Meandro del Say , the northwestern region of  Jaboque , and  Torca-Guaymaral ).

In 2020, two projects caused deep concern among the population: an elevated concrete bridge in the  Juan Amarillo  and a series of hard paths for pedestrians and bicycles in the  Jaboque  and  Cordoba  wetlands.

Wetlands in the south are highly affected as a consequence of urbanization. An example is the wetland  El Burro  which continues to be affected. The passage of roads such as Avenida Ciudad de Cali divides the wetland in two, transforming the wetland and letting the ecosystem with only 0.2 ha of water. Despite the efforts of the mayor's office to recover the wetland, wastewater discharges continue to be its biggest problem.