The impact of Land Use and Land Cover Change (LULCC) is a major issue in conservation biology. In the last 30 years, 85% of undisturbed Chaquean xerophytic forests has been converted to pastures and agricultural lands or is undergoing secondary succession. Land sparing, or the intensification of an export-oriented agriculture to respond to increasing world food demands while sparing land for nature conservation, supports the dominant current land use strategy for the Argentinean Chaco, which is suffering high rates of land use change mainly from forests to soybean plantation fields and shrub lands. This hypothesis predicts recovery of degraded forests due to rural-urban migration, a process that accompanies agricultural intensification. However, there are mixed evidences that either support or reject Land sparing actually taking place. One possible source of divergence is the scale of analysis. Using the Province of Santiago del Estero in the Argentinean dry chaco as an example, we test a methodology to determine if and at which scale land sparing occurs. In a three-step analysis we consider the crucial variables playing a role in the process (forest recovery, protected areas, rural-urban migration) and plot their slope of change in time against the increment in land surface of intensive crops. We use time series of NDVI from MODIS and census data from 2001 and 2010. Preliminary results validate the present methodology as useful to determine the critical scale at which Land sparing occurs.

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