Sebastián Aguiar

• Researcher
• Researcher at University of Buenos Aires

To face the challenge of feeding a growing population that changes its lifestyles and diets while trying to conserve natural resources and to protect biodiversity, there are three main strategies to achieve such sustainability goals: (1) changing current agricultural practices, (2) reducing losses and waste throughout the food production and proces...

Worldwide, human activities are rapidly changing land cover and its spatial configuration. While it is widely acknowledged that habitat loss is a major cause of biodiversity loss, there is less agreement on how biodiversity responds to changes in habitat configuration. We assessed the effects of forest amount and forest fragmentation per se (the nu...

Las lagunas del oeste de la región pampeana presentan una gran heterogeneidad espacial y temporal, no sólo en su tamaño, sino también en su salinidad y contenido de nutrientes y, por ende, en su turbidez, contenido de clorofila y sedimentos. Aprovechando la amplia disponibilidad de información provista por sensores remotos y muestreos a campo, este...

Deforestation is a main threat to the biosphere due to its contribution to biodiversity loss, carbon emissions, and land degradation. Most deforestation is illegal and continues unabated, representing around half of the total deforestation in the tropics and subtropics. Quantifying illegal deforestation is challenging, let alone assessing the socia...

The livestock sector contributes significantly to the resource-use and pollution from food systems. Therefore, assessing the current and future environmental impacts of livestock production under different systems in different countries, has become an important area of solution-oriented research in sustainability science. We performed a cradle-to-f...

Diets link human health with environmental sustainability, offering promising pressure points to enhance the sustainability of food systems. We investigated the health, environmental, and economic dimensions of the current diet in Argentina and the possible effects of six dietary change scenarios on nutrient adequacy, dietary quality, food expendit...

Dry forests are among the most threatened ecosystems globally, due to agricultural expansion driven by the increasing demand for food, fibers, and energy in developed and emerging countries. Among these, the forests of the South American Gran Chaco are one of the global deforestation hotspots. The Argentine Dry Chaco has been the focus of several s...

Tree planting and reforestation are currently in the spotlight as strategies for solving global environmental degradation. Many ongoing large-scale initiatives have proposed restoring millions of hectares and planting a trillion trees to solve climate change and biodiversity loss. Forest and landscape restoration (FLR) is one of the approaches most...

Deforestation control is one of the major challenges worldwide. The aim of this study was to analyse deforestation under the Forest Law in the Argentine Dry Chaco ecoregion a decade after its enactment and to assess compliance with forest protection standards in this region. For this purpose, we overlapped the provincial land zoning maps with an an...

Aim: Invasive species have the potential to alter hydrological processes by changing the local water balance. However, general patterns of how rainfall is partitioned into interception, throughfall and stemflow for invasive species worldwide have been seldom explored. We (a) describe the percentage of interception, throughfall and stemflow for inva...

Por su continuidad espacial y su relativa homogeneidad ecológica y biofísica, las ecorregiones son un nivel de organización apropiado para discutir y planificar iniciativas de conservación del ambiente a escala regional y nacional. Las interacciones complejas entre las características ecológicas de las ecorregiones, los cambios socioeconómicos loca...

Tabla A2. Puntaje de cada presión (de 0 a 100, con valores más altos reflejando una mayor incidencia de la misma) en las ecorregiones terrestres de Argentina en base a su jerarquización sobre cuatro dimensiones.

¿Por qué los impactos ambientales de la agricultura de granos de Argentina siguen un camino tan distintos al de otros "graneros" del mundo como los de Europa, Norteamérica o Asia? ¿Que caminos siguen los sistemas agrícolas cuando sus sociedades pasan de la subsistencia a al desarrollo industrial o agroexportador? Pueden ver esta presentacion aqui h...

Sustainability science recognizes the importance of the integrated assessment of the ecological and social systems in land-use planning. However, most studies so far have been conceptual rather than empirical. We developed a framework to characterize the social-ecological systems heterogeneity according to its functioning through the identification...

The global increase in the proportion of land cultivated with pollinator‐dependent crops implies increased reliance on pollination services. Yet agricultural practices themselves can profoundly affect pollinator supply and pollination. Extensive monocultures are associated with a limited pollinator supply and reduced pollination, whereas agricultur...

During the past decades, the Ecological Modernization Theory, and associated ideas such as the Forest Transition Theory and Land Sparing Hypothesis, have dominated the academic and policy arenas regarding the solutions to current environmental crises. However, critiques were raised as these theories, originally conceived for developed countries, st...

In a complex environmental, productive and socioeconomic scenario, on November 28th, 2007, the National Act N°26.331 of “Minimum Standards for the Environmental Protection of Native Forests” (known as the “Forest Law”) was sanctioned in Argentina with the purpose of protecting native forests at the national scale. In this article, we aim to critica...

En un complejo escenario ambiental, productivo y socioeconómico, el 28 de noviembre de 2007 fue sancionada en Argentina la Ley Nacional Nº 26.331 de “Presupuestos Mínimos de Protección Ambiental de los Bosques Nativos" (conocida como "Ley de bosques") con el propósito de proteger los bosques nativos a escala nacional. En este artículo nos proponemo...

Land use zoning has been proposed as an instrument to steer sustainable land use and reduce deforestation. Its effectiveness is a growing concern among researchers and decision makers. Nowadays, the dry forests of the Argentine Chaco are a global hotspot of deforestation, where a zoning policy has been established through the enactment of a Nationa...

V Congreso Internacional de Servicios Ecosistémicos de los Neotrópicos

La biodiversidad está siendo destruida a una tasa alarmante. Una de las principales causas de esta pérdida es el cambio de uso del suelo, que se basa en la agricultura y la ganadería convencionales. Las prácticas de manejo como el monocultivo y el uso intensivo de agroquímicos reducen el número de especies de plantas, aves, insectos y otros grupos...

Fetzel et al. (2017) globally mapped the gap between observed and potential grazing intensity (GI): the ratio between consumption by livestock and aboveground net primary productivity (ANPP). Fetzel et al. (2017) estimated grazing land, forage production and livestock demand at a half-degree resolution. This article is protected by copyright. All r...

The perception that the strategies carried out by governments for biodiversity conservation and ecosystem services provision are ineffective or insuficient, led to diverse new alternatives based on economic instruments driven by both private actors (fundamentally NGO’s) and governments. Some of these instruments seek to internalize a positive exter...

Los cambios en el uso de la tierra (CUT) son una de las dimensiones más importantes del cambio global, principalmente por su efecto sobre las demás dimensiones, por ejemplo la biodiversidad, los ciclos biogeoquímicos y el clima. La deforestación, uno de los principales componentes de los CUT, se ha concentrado durante la última década en los bosque...

En este capítulo se plantea la importancia de abordar el estudio de los Sistemas Socio-Ecológicos para la planificación territorial, realizando un análisis integrado de los sistemas biofísicos y humanos. Mediante este enfoque, la gestión de los recursos naturales no se centra solo en los componentes del sistema, sino en sus relaciones, interaccione...

Conceptual and Methodological Elements for Cumulative Environmental Effects Assessment (CEEA) in Subtropical Forests. The Case of Eastern Salta, Argentina: Northern Argentina experienced an unprecedented deforestation rate of xerophitic forests as a consequence of agricultural expansion. In the Province of Salta, 26% of the forest were removed betw...

Northern Argentina experienced an unprecedented deforestation rate of xerophitic forests as a consequence of agricultural expansion. In the Province of Salta, 26% of the forest were removed between 1977 and 2008. At the end of 2007, just before the No. 26331 Law of Native Forest Protection was voted by the Congress, the highest annual rate of defor...