An urban ecology primer for Montevideo: Heat island in a Latin American social-ecological context

Urbanization is a major anthropogenic alteration that involves dramatic changes in environmental conditions. Urban heat island (UHI) is a thermic phenomenon where urban-associated modified conditions increase local air and surface temperatures, affecting ecosystem processes and services, human health and well-being, and has been linked to social-economic factors and urbanizing patterns. A surface UHI (SUHI) assessment for Montevideo, Uruguay, was perfomed combining a Landsat-based high-resolution land surface temperature map and a long term neighbourhood level assessment, and explored causes and drivers of the phenomenon. Additionally, social-ecological attributes were analyzed at the neighbourhood level, linking ecosystem services (ES) estimations to social-economic census data. SUHI scaled linearly with impervious surface at the neighbourhood level. ES showed patterns consistent to a young city with marginalized population settling on the rural edge of the urbanization gradient. This work contributes to the body of urban studies by bringing novel information from an under-represented regional social-ecological context.