Updating Bark Proportions for the Estimation of Tropical Timber Volumes by Indigenous Community-Based Forest Enterprises in Quintana Roo, Mexico

Julieta Rosell,Marcela Olguín,Christian Wehenkel,Sandra García-Jácome,Abraham Pérez-Martínez,José Arreola Palacios

doi:10.3390/f8090338

Abstract

Sustainable management of tropical forests is essential for conserving the ecosystem services they provide and protecting the livelihoods of the millions of people who depend on these forests. Community-based forest management in Quintana Roo, Mexico, has shown that conserving forests while generating economic benefits is achievable in the tropics. However, this management is carried out with technical gaps that jeopardize sustainable use of these resources. Crucial among these gaps is a lack of equations for precise calculations of logged timber volumes. Current equations employ a proportion of bark volume (PBV) of 0.14 for mahogany and a flat 0.10 for species with dense woods, despite their wide variation in bark thickness. Here, using Meyer’s method, we calculated species-specific PBVs for the most commercially-important species in the Felipe Carrillo Puerto community-based logging operation. For most species, the new PBVs were smaller, indicating that wood volumes are currently underestimated. However, for two species, PBVs were higher. New values could influence the profits of the local enterprise and on the management of some of the most commercially-important species of Mexico’s tropical forests through changes in the numbers of individuals felled.

Highlights

Sustainable management of tropical forests is essential for the conservation of the ecosystem services these forests provide [1,2]
We examined the correlation between proportion of bark volume (PBV) and log diameter, between bark volume and total volume, and between wood volume and total volume to examine how bark amount varied with tree size and whether this change had to be taken into account in the calculations of commercialized timber volumes
We examined the relationship between wood volume (WV) and TV by fitting a nonlinear regression per species based on Equation (4), where β3 is the model coefficient estimated by the fitting process

Summary

Introduction

Sustainable management of tropical forests is essential for the conservation of the ecosystem services these forests provide [1,2]. Tropical forests worldwide provide a livelihood for millions of people, many of them belonging to marginalized indigenous populations [8]. With its diverse indigenous populations and its 31 million hectares of wet and dry tropical forests, Mexico ranks sixth among countries with the largest tropical forest areas [9,10]. 60% of Mexico’s forested area (including both temperate and tropical forests) is managed by local communities [11]. This depth of experience has made Mexico a leading example of community-based

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Conclusion