Marco Lentini

Consumer demand for the premier neotropical luxury timber, big‐leaf mahogany ( Swietenia macrophylla ), has driven boom‐and‐bust logging cycles for centuries, depleting local and regional supplies from Mexico to Bolivia. We revise the standard historic range map for mahogany in South America and estimate the extent to which commercial stocks have been depleted using satellite data, expert surveys, and sawmill processing center data from Brazil. We estimate an historic range of 278 million hectares spanning Venezuela to Bolivia, 57% of this in Brazil. Approximately 58 million hectares (21%) of mahogany's historic range had been lost to forest conversion by 2001. Commercial populations had been logged from at least 125 million more hectares, reducing the commercial range to 94 million hectares (34% of historic). Surviving stocks are extremely low‐density populations in remote regions representing a smaller fraction of historic stocks than expected based on estimated current commercial range. Our method could advance international policy debates such as listing proposals for CITES Appendices by clarifying the commercial and conservation status of high‐value timber species similar to mahogany about which little information is available. The fate of remaining mahogany stocks in South America will depend on transforming current forest management practices into sustainable production systems.

Logging in natural forests is a vital economic activity in the Brazilian Amazon. However, illegal and unplanned logging is exhausting forests rapidly. In 2006, a new forestry law in Brazil (Lei 11,284/2006) established the legal framework to develop state and national public forests for multiple uses. To support public forest planning efforts, we combine spatially explicit data on logging profits, biodiversity, and potential for community use for use within a forest planning optimization model. While generating optimal land use configurations, the model enables an assessment of the market and nonmarket tradeoffs associated with different land use priorities. We demonstrate the model's use for Faro State Forest, a 636,000 ha forest embedded within a large mosaic of conservation units recently established in the state of Pará. The datasets used span the entire Brazilian Amazon, implying that the analysis can be repeated for any public forest planning effort within the region.

Abstract:  Millions of hectares of future timber concessions are slated to be implemented within large public forests under the forest law passed in 2006 by the Brazilian Congress. Additional millions of hectares of large, privately owned forests and smaller areas of community forests are certified as well managed by the Forest Stewardship Council, based on certification standards that will be reviewed in 2007. Forest size and ownership are two key factors that influence management objectives and the capacity of forest managers to achieve them. Current best ecological practices for timber production from Brazil's native Amazon forests are limited to reduced‐impact logging (RIL) systems that minimize the environmental impacts of harvest operations and that obey legal restrictions regarding minimum diameters, rare species, retention of seed trees, maximum logging intensity, preservation of riparian buffers, fire protection, and wildlife conservation. Compared with conventional, predatory harvesting that constitutes >90% of the region's timber production, RIL dramatically reduces logging damage and helps maintain forest cover and the presence of rare tree species, but current RIL guidelines do not assure that the volume of timber removed can be sustained in future harvests. We believe it is counterproductive to expect smallholders to subscribe to additional harvest limitations beyond RIL, that larger private forested landholdings managed for timber production should be sustainable with respect to the total volume of timber harvested per unit area per cutting cycle, and that large public forests should sustain volume production of individual harvested species. These additional requirements would improve the ecological sustainability of forest management and help create a stable forest‐based sector of the region's economy, but would involve costs associated with lengthened cutting cycles, reduced harvest intensities, and/or postharvest silviculture to promote adequate growth and regeneration.