Multitemporal Analysis For The Evaluation Of The Construction Impact Of The Pacific Refinery. Case Study

The Pacific Refinery (PR) "Eloy Alfaro" is a petrochemical project for producing petroleum derivatives. The construction of this project in El Aromo, Manabí required infrastructure such as roads, water and energy supplies for operation. Therefore, it caused alterations in the tropical dry forest’s coverage and affected the region’s ecosystem services. In order to facilitate an evaluation of the PR implementation area’s impact, the study used K-means clustering of satellite images to conduct a multitemporal analysis of this area’s land cover. The research involved acquiring and processing Landsat 8 and Landsat 9 satellite images for 2016-2022 and unsupervised classification to identify land cover. Results indicated that by 2016, the tropical dry forest cover was 942.53 ha deforested and 226.01 ha degraded, associated with land movements for the refinery construction. In 2022, the deforested area corresponded to 793.45 ha and 278.97 ha degraded, impacting animal habitats, agricultural productivity, and water quality, necessitating appropriate land management.