PARENT SESSION
Organized Oral Session 33: Restoring and designing ecosystems for a crowded planet: Provision of ecosystem services or mere window dressing?
Organizer(s): ML Martinez and M Palmer
Wednesday, August 10, 1:30 PM - 5:00 PM, Meeting Room 510a, Level 5, Palais des congrès de Montréal
An invented landscape: The tropical rain forest at Los Tuxtlas, Mexico.
Guevara, Sergio*,1, Laborde, Javier1, Sánchez-Ríos, Graciela1, 1 Instituto de Ecología, A.C., Xalapa, Veracruz, México
ABSTRACT- The tropical rain forest ecosystem in southern Mexico has been modified by agricultural activities more than four thousand years. In the long history of the use of the rain forest there were successive deforestation events and abandonment of extensive areas. Today, because of the deforestation, the surface remainder is fragmented and immersed in pastures or cultivation fields. The traditional system of use and abandonment of the ecosystem was based on the capacity for natural regeneration of the forest that in turn depended of secondary succession. The studies of landscape ecology of the fragmented forest at Los Tuxtlas mountain has demonstrated the importance of the biological diversity for the stability of the landscape, but they have also shown the relevance of the ecological processes for the maintenance of diversity. Among those ecological processes the connectivity among the forest fragments, is highlighted. We chose an element of the landscape that has a key role: the isolated forest trees, left in the pastures. The distribution of the individuals -of more than 100 registered species- are remainders of the traditional agricultural management, used to manipulate the process of forest regeneration in abandoned fields. We propose the use of these trees for the restoration of the current landscape and to invent functional ecosystems that maintain the local biodiversity and lend basic ecological services.
Key words: Restauration, Reforestation, Conectivity, Landscape ecology