GREEN AND WOODED AREAS IN THE URBAN AREA OF CANTON JIPIJAPA

Abstract

The urban green and wooded areas fulfil undisputed ecological and environmental functions, such is the importance of them that a rational and adequate management is fundamental, especially, on the alignment trees, being these the ones that suffer the most hostile and neglected situations. In spite of their effectiveness in increasing environmental quality, there are few studies that focus on evaluating trees and green areas in urban areas in the province of Manabí. The objective of the research was to evaluate the woodland in the urban zone of Jipijapa canton, with an area of 16,473 m2, where a census of the existing parks was made, and an inventory of the forest species was also elaborated. For this, it was considered that parks are clearly delimited public spaces, dominated by tree vegetation and intended as public green areas. In the study, we obtained dasometric information on the trees of the 10 existing public parks in the canton; we applied the cartographic analysis from the elaboration of maps, based on the georeferencing of the green areas, which helped us to interpret the total number of trees in each park and we determined the value index of ecological importance of the tree species found in the study area, where the species Azadirachta indica A. Juss. (NEEN) was the most representative with 52.22 % and the Citrus limon L. (LEMON) with 1.68 %, the least representative