Forest conservation strategies in Southern Patagonia: Differences between theory and practice

MARTÍNEZ PASTUR, G; SCHINDLER, S; LENCINAS, MV; PERI, P

Congreso; IUFRO World Congress; 2014

There is a lack ofbiodiversity conservation strategies in traditional agriculture and forestmanagement of Argentina.A national legislation (26331/07) promotes forest conservation, butbiodiversity values are not included in the classification, while most of theprotection areas are located at marginal unproductive forests. In this study,we compare biodiversity pattern of understory plants in Nothofagus forests of Tierra del Fuego (Argentina) with the forestordination proposed for the region in the framework of the law 26331/07. Weused data of vascular plants surveys, and employed environmental niche factoranalysis (ENFA; software Biomapper 4.0) to produce a series of spatiallyexplicit habitat suitability models for 35 vascular plants, applying climatic, topographicand forest variables as predictors. Therefore, we produced maps representing biodiversitypattern based on the 20 most important vascular plant species (cover +occurrence) for each of the three main forest types. Comparing these maps withthe landscape ordination proposed by the local Forest Office, we detected thatthe selection criteria for forest protection followed topographic values (e.g.slope and altitude) and distance to cities, but did not consider biodiversity.Our analysis confirms great differences in the conservation effort among thedifferent forest types along the region.