The role of tropical dry forests for biodiversity, carbon and water conservation in the neotropics: lessons learned and opportunities for its sustainable management
By Carlos Portillo-Quintero, Arturo Sanchez-Azofeifa, J. Calvo-Alvarado, M. Quesada, Mário M. do Espírito Santo. Regional Environmental Change, 2015
125 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Abstract In this paper, we provide a comprehensive evaluation of the current regional literature associated with tropical dry forest (TDF) along three main axes: biodiversity, carbon and water conservation in the neotropics. Our analysis provides three key findings: (1) from the biodiversity point of view, we document that high degrees of endemism, diversity of plant life forms and ecophysiological types as key elements for their conservation across the Americas, (2) from the carbon storage point of view, we found that if the world’s TDFs were restored they whole ecosystem would comprise 22 Pg of carbon in aboveground biomass. In the Americas alone, TDF restoration could potentially add 8 Pg of carbon to the potential total ecosystem carbon stock, (3) we found that at least 66 % of water reservoirs in the neotropics are located within dry forest ecoregions; therefore, the conservation of the quality of freshwater sources for human consumption in the neotropics is directly dependent on the sustainable management of TDF-dominated landscapes. In this paper, we stress that advocacy for conservation and sustainable management of TDF will benefit from integrating it’s value in biophysical terms (e.g. carbon, biodiversity) with key ecosystem services and uses (e.g. its impact on hydrological dynamics and its potential for fostering ecotourism initiatives and entrepreneurship). By doing this, support and awareness could be wider and more effective in the long term, especially from national and local communities.
Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Horticulture, Nature and Landscape Conservation
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2488b0af1b6b6c9b7c358c7b5281735e63c81ed7
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In Global and Planetary Change
In Nature and Landscape Conservation
Citations in the corpus
- Tropical Dry Forest Diversity, Climatic Response, and Resilience in a Changing Climate (2019, background): “The high population densities in TDFs are due to climate, geography, and a high number of neotropical freshwater sources [21]; however, despite its regional and global importance, it remains severely under-studied relative to the humid forest [22].”