3.1. Stable Tenure and Forested Area
The fact that the three properties studied remained forested and the land is still being used as forest shows continued interest from land owners in the forest business. The Corrales woodlot was sold during the cutting cycle (2002) because the owners wanted to move away from the region. For them the sale was a profit-taking choice. The new owner also owns two sawmills and several pieces of forest land. For the new owner, the acquisition of Corrales improves the set of supply options for his sawmills, and it is a smart purchase of a piece of forest land with a promising future.
Cruz del Tuito and Llanito remained in the hands of their original owners. Cruz del Tuito is an indigenous community whose members also have interests in ranching, an activity of larger importance than timber growing. Only a small minority of community members are directly involved in logging operations in the forest, or in the administrative work. Most of the timber is sold on the stump to loggers who develop specialty products out of the 97 species grown.
On the other hand, El Llanito owners consider themselves investors and executives who make decisions about the land. All roads, logging, and complementary activities are contracted to small local firms. The Sánchez family, owners of El Llanito y cuatro más, sets general goals by occasionally consulting all relatives. The general guidelines are implemented by the family legal representative. So far three generations have managed these and other pieces of forest land on a continuous basis, and they still have a vision of remaining in the timber-growing business indefinitely.
Tenure in these three cases conveys a sense of feasibility and stability for timber investments. This outcome satisfies the goal of stewardship of the land while partially sustaining income of rural households. The three forest management techniques studied might not be entirely responsible, but rather the owners’ preferences and the prevailing regulatory conditions; not only the three methods studied here, but also most other forest management methods in current use in Mexico can be expected to yield the same outcome. Deforestation and forest degradation are processes that involve specific circumstances that are rarely present in timber lands under forest management.
Sicodesi is the only method with an explicit intention to promote rural development. The method was designed for national use. Its point of reference is an idealized profile of the peasant’s preferences, needs, and capabilities [
24]). The idea that rural development will be possible by providing income from timber growing, and jobs in logging, is an oversimplification in Sicodesi’s rationale. In this research it became clear that the three cases studied are similar in terms of the land owners. The forest managers represent extended families. The general mandate for them is to increase the economic value of the land, proceeding in a risk-averse manner. The three owners studied, and most owners in this region, including owners of communal lands, prefer selling stumpage to independent loggers. They see no purpose in taking advantage of value-added activities such as silvicultural treatments or logging operations, so they contract them whenever possible.
Regardless of the kind of forest management, in this region compliance with tax, environmental, forest, and community regulations has been the norm throughout the time period studied. There have been no sanctions when law enforcement has reviewed the three study cases studied.
3.2. Planned and Actual Operations
The three forest management plans were carried out as written, although schedule changes were made due to unexpected disturbances (fire and pests). The cases selected for this study were above average in terms of stewardship and responsible management, but in essence they differ little, in terms of how much of the plan was actually implemented, from any other forest plan in Mexico.
Sicodesi’s application has benefited from the stable technical leadership that the local foresters at Consultoría Forestal Mascota SC have provided for over 30 years. Therefore, implementation in this region is closer to the Sicodesi design by the University of Helsinki’s researchers. Some of the professional foresters in Mascota were part of the development team working in Helsinki.
Plan Costa’s Cruz del Tuito is also a case of consistent forest management policies by a single forester, Gonzalo Millán Curiel Alcaráz. Curiel was involved in the group that developed Plan Costa, and afterwards he has applied it over 193,372 ha in the Pacific coast of Jalisco, for the last 30 years. In many ways it is difficult to separate results that come from the method, from the personal talent of the regional forester. This is particularly so in the case of decisions requiring knowledge about the silvics of particular species, and also in the skill to match field scenarios with wavering market preferences.
Removals, residual stock at the end of the 10 year planning horizon, changes in area occupied by the commercial forest, and net growth outcomes follow:
After 13 years—the second half of a cutting cycle—the new forest inventory of Cruz del Tuito reports Plan Costa has produced an enriched forest that contains increased presence of 10 out of the 12 most desirable timber species (
Figure 2). One species,
Enterolobium cyclocarpum, suffered severe heart rot mortality. The disease reduced
E. cyclocarpum standing volume abundance from 45% to 18%, though this is still a considerable presence that keeps this species among those with the largest share of forest biomass. This species was also abundant in ranching areas, unmanaged forests, and in backyards. These other
E. cyclocarpum populations suffered catastrophic losses, much worse than in the Plan Costa managed forest. The success of regenerating most commercial species while keeping their volume stocking at reasonable levels and the site fully occupied by timber producing trees were accomplishments for Plan Costa that compare favorably with results in other tropical silviculture cases reported, such as those in Putz
et al. [
25], and Duah-Gyamfi
et al. [
26]. In 2003, Cruz del Tuito halted logging operations while a new administration implemented improved accounting procedures to correct clerical irregularities in the procurement chain; however, latter activities picked up the slack, so by 2010 all volume sold was already harvested and delivered to the final user. A sizable percentage of planned volume (69.7%) was left standing on the forest for lack of market opportunities [
27].
Plan Costa applied group selection cuts in Cruz del Tuito. Sicodesi treatments in Corrales consisted of seedtree cuts, shelterwood cuts, thinnings, light thinnings, and selective cuts. Mapa followed a unique stand-by-stand silviculture prescription favoring development of scarce late successional and initiation (regeneration) stand structures. The end of the planning horizon means renewal of management plans. The process involves an assessment of the previous planning period’s performance. According to the most recent management plans, the quality of silviculture prescriptions is satisfactory in terms of the effect on the residual stand, for all management methods and silvicultural systems studied.
Figure 2.
Diameter frequencies 1997–2010 of important timber species managed by PLAN COSTA in Comunidad Indígena Santa Cruz del Tuito, Jalisco, México.
Figure 2.
Diameter frequencies 1997–2010 of important timber species managed by PLAN COSTA in Comunidad Indígena Santa Cruz del Tuito, Jalisco, México.
Residual stocking in Mapa/Llanito increased marginally (2.1%), while in the previous cycle (1992–2002), standing volume had diminished by 17% because of pests and fire damage. In the case of Sicodesi/Corrales and Plan Costa/Tuito, residual inventory tended to decrease. The downturn in Cruz del Tuito was 5%. In Corrales’ case the drop might appear steeper (9.2%), but still acceptable performance. Actual stocking of the commercial stands in Corrales increased from 117.2 m
3/ha to 145.7 m
3/ha. The Sicodesi simulation model forecasts that residual standing stock in Corrales will grow at a rate of 4.1 m
3/ha/year during the next 30 years. In general, the three cases reflect a policy of increases in standing inventories, increases in tree size, and age (
Figure 2,
Figure 3 and
Figure 4).
Figure 3.
Goal and final (2000) age distribution in Corrales, managed under SICODESI.
Figure 3.
Goal and final (2000) age distribution in Corrales, managed under SICODESI.
Figure 4.
Starting (2002), residual (2012), and forecasted abundance of seral stages in El Llanito y cuatro más, managed under MAPA.
Figure 4.
Starting (2002), residual (2012), and forecasted abundance of seral stages in El Llanito y cuatro más, managed under MAPA.
The region of Sierra Occidental where the cases are located went through a couple of difficult decades (1980–2000). There were numerous catastrophic wildfires, and afterwards mistletoe and barkbeetle infestations. The aftermath was a reduction of about a third of the regional biomass. The 2000–2010 decade was a time in which foresters wanted to build up forest cover, inventories, and resilience. All three methods and other regional forest management methods attained this goal through a policy of harvesting a fraction of the net growth, and investing vigorously in reforestation and site amelioration. Corrales was particularly successful, and it reached a remarkable improvement: 25.0% commercial forest land in 1990 rose to 42.6% in 2000, as a result of reforestation and the protective management of stands affected by barkbeetles, mistletoe and fire.
This success in rebuilding the forest’s productive potential definitely had an impact on net cash flow, a variable directly related to volume harvested. Sales revenues foregone in Plan Costa and Sicodesi were much worse than in Mapa, simply because Mapa has a financial assessment routine that identified better choices. Corrales invested heavily in land reclamation, while Cruz del Tuito left two thirds of the allowable cut in the forest. In the meantime, Llanito harvested close to the allowable cut, slightly less than the previous cycle when it was under Sicodesi.
As previously indicated, removals were conservative. It should therefore not be a surprise that timber output flow proceeded in a reliable way, with marginal fluctuations in Mapa/Llanito and Sicodesi/Corrales. When fire or pests were severe, salvage and sanitation cuts substituted the planned volumes harvested to sustain an even flow of products (
Figure 5,
Figure 6 and
Figure 7). It is important to add that El Llanito planned no cut in the 10th year of operations; this was for convenience of the timber procurement system, and it does not reflect a problem nor a planning error.
Figure 5.
Harvest output in Comunidad Indígena Santa Cruz del Tuito, managed with Plan Costa.
Figure 5.
Harvest output in Comunidad Indígena Santa Cruz del Tuito, managed with Plan Costa.
Figure 6.
Harvest relative to standing stock by cutting area in Corrales, managed under Sicodesi.
Figure 6.
Harvest relative to standing stock by cutting area in Corrales, managed under Sicodesi.
Figure 7.
Output volume in El Llanito y cuatro más, managed by Mapa.
Figure 7.
Output volume in El Llanito y cuatro más, managed by Mapa.
The Plan Costa/Cruz del Tuito case needs some additional explanation: community planners and the professional forester in charge intentionally plan excess silviculture opportunities so that every individual community member will have an array of different products in a given cutting area from which to draw the products solicited. When a given product is requested, if available, it will be sold, and only then marked, felled, transported, and tallied as harvested. Thus the apparent high percentage of planned cut that is not harvested (69% in 10 years of operation) is an administrative buffer to assure high coverage of sales demanded. Shadow costs involved in this strategy are not relevant to the community members. The indigenous community of Santa Cruz del Tuito depends on diverse income producing activities, cattle raising being the most important one. Forest land is one more economic opportunity at the disposal of every single community member. Consequences in terms of timber growth, stand regeneration, health, or complex late successional stages are a matter of further study. Most likely, the current structure is still young and can go many more years with little or no silviculture interventions.
3.3. Non Timber Values
Plan Costa, Sicodesi and Mapa do not contain a comprehensive set of elements to address non-timber values. In the larger scenario of regional and national issues and concerns, none of the study cases has made any impact on any of the expected goals. Issues like migrant species, or large and symbolic species of wildlife such as jaguar, are a considered in the management plans and stand level operations, but information on habitat requirements, response to disturbance or to logging is incomplete for these species and forest values. Hence, the actual level of control over these matters is weak.
Mapa is disintct from the other two methods in following drastic policies known as biopaths to reintroduce the natural disturbance regime, and increase the presence of all successional stages. Mapa’s emphasis has been in increasing area of regeneration and late seral scenarios because they are the least frequent stand structures. So far, after ten years of continuous landscape management, Mapa has not yet reshaped the geographic distribution and frequency of distinct ecological structures, those built by the previous cycle under Sicodesi. Rather, Mapa has maintained the general proportion seen in 2002 (
Figure 4).
Nonetheless, the forest today in El Llanito offers a little more diversity and high quality habitat for wildlife thanks to careful attention to best management practices. The planned and actual distribution of seral stages in Llanito is seen in
Figure 4. Comparing Llanito/Mapa with the respective frequencies of stand classes at Corrales/Sicodesi, and Tuito/Plan Costa, it seems subjectively that the guidance at Llanito/Mapa has paid it off in terms of a more diverse and rich set of scenarios. The improvement is striking compared with Sicodesi, since Sicodesi was the previous management method used in El Llanito, and it is reasonable to assume that Sicodesi might have continued if Mapa had not been employed in 2002.
According to Mexican environmental regulations, enforcement can only operate at the ownership level. There is no doubt that most of the important values beyond commodities occur at larger territorial levels [
4], so the proportional contribution of forest stewardship through timber-oriented silviculture might be negligible in all cases studied here.
3.4. Water Resources
Neither Plan Costa nor Mapa follow up on specific hydrologic features, but Sicodesi does. However, so far the Corrales case has not assessed if silviculture, by design, accomplished its targets of reduced erosion, reduced flooding, or any other water-related goal.
Mapa places a high priority on using the best available road design. Roads are not evaluated in Mexico, so there is no comparison between Llanito and the two alternate cases, Corrales and Cruz del Tuito. However, considering the theoretical support that low impact roads have on water resources [
28], it is expected that Mapa is carrying out a more responsible management of silviculture and water interactions [
22,
29,
30].
Mapa specifies road engineering in detail, including a set of best management practices such as proper culvert design, ample road lighting, outsloped roads, road closure after harvest, and so on. One item worth mentioning is the fact that Llanito roads realigned during the study period (2002 to 2011) needed no major maintenance at the following entry, which is underway (2012 to 2022).
In the case of Plan Costa, harvest is concentrated on groups of trees. Terrain tends to be gently sloped, so little erosion was seen during the second forest inventory, attributable to roads or timber harvesting. Most logging is done manually, so fewer roads are needed for small vehicles to haul products. For these reasons, water resources in Cruz del Tuito might deserve better grades than Sicodesi, though not better than Llanito’s.
Important resources like irrigation and urban uses of water do not benefit from silvicultural practices or forest policies that are designed to secure water quality, volume, or seasonality because commercial timber land is only a small fraction (8%) of all terrain where water flows on its way to the intended user. However, water quality does have a significant impact on habitat for aquatic flora and fauna, and it sustains vital processes for all vegetation, particularly riparian communities [
31].
3.5. Wildlife
Flora and fauna are regional attributes. The forest properties studied are small, as small as most other ownerships in Mexico. Hence, there is no way to report on the effect of silviculture on wildlife.
From management plans and reports of disturbances it is possible to rank the methods from a wildlife perspective. Sicodesi follows an aggressive policy to liquidate oldgrowth, reduce incidents of pests, diseases and wildfire, to maintain as much of the land in the younger age categories, increase density closer to full occupation, maintain even spacing, and favor the most commercial and productive species. Plan Costa, conversely, uses a limited portion of the forest, removing groups of trees but leaving most of the ground untouched. A great deal of operations in Plan Costa are manual or animal logging, and roads are the minimum needed for small trucks. In Mapa there is a definite policy to increase the least frequent stand structures (mature, and regeneration), and a specific prescription for each scenario, from ridge tops to riparian influence zones.
As expected under these policies, forest inventory surveys report reduced habitat diversity in Sicodesi, and a significant increase in structural diversity and connectivity in Mapa. Plan Costa might have had a continuation of the original wild conditions except for the intense root rot attacks on parota (Enterolobium cyclocarpum). Since parota represented more than 45% of the initial stocking, losses have changed drastically the stand density, opened the overstory, liquidated parota volume (down to 18%), and lost most of the very large trees in the stand. Most of this dead material was salvaged, so actual removals appear larger than expected, although commercial entries were few and close to the plan.
3.6. Science and Culture
Sicodesi was the forest scheduling tier of a grand design in the latter part of the 20th century that was spearheaded by the federal government. The overall aim of this grand scheme was to position federal institutions as leaders setting the direction and pace of forest sector development. Forest communities were invited to take over all parts of the value chain in the timber industry, including sawmills and other manufacturing. The scale of this program justified a considerable investment in the developed of the Sicodesi decision support software. The algorithm in Sicodesi followed general guidelines from a preliminary normal yield table. Prescriptions were drafted on site in every stand, after suggestions from a silviculture simulation’s model outputs, adjusted by field conditions, and policies regarding multiple natural resources, environmental impacts, and socioeconomic goals. Sicodesi is the oldest and also the most complex, sophisticated, and widely used of the three methods presented here.
Plan Costa is a simple solution to the many joint decisions faced in tropical forests. The Plan Costa scheme calls for the individualized management of each of about a hundred woody species, palms, and other plants that grow under different forest types (medium and low tropical forest, palm groves, brushland, oak forest). The sophistication in this method stems from the successful regeneration of all commercial species.
Mapa’s strong conceptual feature is in the renewal of the ecological basis of silviculture. Forest culture among the public and in the academic institutions is bogged down in imaginary realities created during the time of environmental awareness of middle 20th century. Some old beliefs are rooted in the notion that forests better fulfill societal mandates if left without cultivation; these explanations go against current forest ecology knowledge. It is quite difficult to move the public mind to accept disturbances as part of the natural set of desirable events. Also, the public and academic circles are unaware of the disproportional differences in impact represented by silviculture, natural disturbance events, roads and logging equipment. Evidence [
29,
30] puts roads at the top of the list of environmental concerns, a notion that is unacceptable to public and opinion leaders. Stakeholders like the forest owners and professional foresters regard roads as a negligible concern. Treatments, even those that specifically mimic natural processes, such as stand replacement, are rejected by the media and public opinion [
32,
33]. As in most other innovation cases, time might help settle these issues, but in the meantime Mapa has no more public support than any other forest technology.
Regardless of public opinion, historic trends of the last 30 years in the region point out the increasing importance of tourism [
23]. Landscape features that attract visitors include the presence of natural forests. As long as the forest has a dense canopy cover, it is not required that the forest should be efficiently managed for timber. This fact has been clearer in the coastal tropical forests. If current preferences could have been forecasted 30 years ago, silviculture emphasis on simplified, homogeneous structures might have changed to diversified stand structures. More of the harvestable value could have been removed, and concern for disturbances might have been downgraded. A similar short-sighted attitude has been common across the world [
3]. Instead of setting management goals for commodity production, a strategy to deal with changing social preferences and historic events could have been wiser [
34].
The three cases studied can be considered community forestry because they are managed that way, and not as industrial or public forests. They are private lands; the public has no access to the forest, although these three ownerships are crossed by public roads. A permit from the owner is required for visitors, and they are forbidden to hunt game or collect plants or non-timber forest products. Cattle grazing is tolerated as long as the cattle owner negotiates terms of use with the forest owner. Forest owner policy is to eradicate grazing in the long run. The location of these forests also discourages visitors and contemplative uses of the land [
17]. In general, the use of land resources is in the hands of the forest owner, so there is a scant contact of most other persons with wildlands in general.
The public in Jalisco has remained suspicious of all silvicultural activities. Fire and pest events are seen as avoidable losses demanding additional regulation and strong enforcement [
33]. University institutions and academic groups are actively seeking to set public opinion in favor of additional legislation restricting silviculture, and demanding new private natural easements. At the same time, the public and decision makers have rejected the possibility of having public lands for conservation, or for any other purpose. Government is considered an inefficient landlord. In general, public opinion and government leaders admit that forest communities have the legal right to use land resources, though there is a strong preference for gradually phasing out timber harvesting. Household income from forestry is being replaced by nature tourism and subsidies. The public mandate is for maintaining the current forest structure and boundaries as if a managed second forest would hold all the values of a pristine primary forest [
12].
Stability of the total forested area and the productive forest area are the accomplishments that are closer to the social mandate. However, the outcome seems strongly related to land owner preferences and behavior. Design features in the technology explain little of this performance.
Since Mapa is the only case with explicit financial performance criteria, it was expected that choices in Mapa would be stricter about which investments are worthwhile pursuing, and still set the path to an ecologically richer forest structure. Partial success in El Llanito in improving the non-timber concerns was a token of progress towards fulfilling the social mandate in terms of stewardship of non-market forest values. The change seen might not be enough to fully respond to cultural demands; it is only a sign pointing the road for the future, at least while Mexican forests remain in private hands. Recognition of the practical importance of financial assessments as seen in the Mapa/El Llanito case suggest that future options must explicitly address the private nature of Mexican forestry, and it might be that more effective methods could be developed if they rely on microeconomic theory about the public impact of private forest practices, relative to the private impacts of regulatory takings. The size of these regulatory impacts is massive because there is no upper bound on liability of forest owners whose forests have suffered any damage to material or cultural assets of public importance, such as protected endangered species, regardless of the level of actual effect of silviculture from such events.