Variaciones de la cobertura vegetal empleando el índice normalizado de diferencia de vegetación para monitorear ODS en Manabí - Ecuador

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) define the degradation of soils and forests as a major issue. The use of multispectral images has gained great interest in studying vegetation and quantifying its variation over time. This work evaluates the plant cover dynamics in an area of 768.04 km 2 of Manabí and establishes relationships with the SDGs-TIER III. LANDSAT multispectral images from 1998, 2008, and 2018, which were obtained from the United States Geological Survey (USGS). Geometric and radiometric corrections were made to calculate the NDVI. Data were reclassified in areas of poor and good plant cover with a supervised classification and field validation. The average NDVI for the years 1998, 2008, and 20018 was 0.549; 0.254 and 0.479, respectively. In the beginning, the negative trend of the NDVI stands out, which wasthe reflection in the reduction of plant cover (good) with 498.47 km 2 (64%). Then, in the last decade, the plant cover presented a positive trend. However, the global balance shows a loss of 15.77% of good plant cover, which represents 121.15 km 2 of missing or degraded forests. The results demonstrated the versatility of NDVI as a standard indicator for monitoring environmental SDGs.