Published on February 15, 2025 by Rodrigo Franco
Motivated by our passion for hiking and alerted by the visible deterioration of certain trails, several members of the Anaplian team, in collaboration with México en Datos, decided to conduct a diagnosis of Natural Protected Areas due to the lack of official data. We began with the strictest conservation category, National Parks, whose designation evokes the image of areas entirely dedicated to ecosystem preservation. However, in Mexico, this idealized image does not match reality, as in practice, areas intended for conservation coexist with spaces where agricultural activities and, to a lesser extent, residential constructions are developed.
In the country, the legal framework is based on the General Law of Ecological Balance and Environmental Protection (LGEEPA) and its regulations, which establish the foundations for biodiversity conservation and ecosystem integrity in these spaces. Specifically, the regulations prohibit intensive exploitation in the core protection area of national parks to prevent ecosystem degradation. Similarly, residential construction is generally prohibited in the high-protection core to prevent habitat fragmentation and anthropogenic pressure; however, in practice, there is a coexistence of agricultural uses and some construction, which gives these parks a more ambiguous protection status compared to stricter models, such as those in the United States.
At Anaplian, we have the answer to evaluate this reality. We process all Natural Protected Areas using official boundaries – provided by Protected Planet – along with the European Space Agency's (ESA) land cover attribution model for 2021, counting pixels in each category to obtain their proportions.
A first step in understanding the situation is to analyze satellite photographs: in a monthly composite of more than five years, one can appreciate the cyclical nature of crops on the slopes and the presence of constructions, without clear evidence of expansion of these uses or easily exploitable areas.