Advancing the Management of Natural Forest Regeneration in Diverse Tropical Landscapes

Secondary forests, also known as natural forest regeneration, dominate throughout the tropics. They perform important functions including carbon storage, erosion reduction, recovery of biodiversity and interactions, and provision of timber and other resources for local use. The increasing demand for forest resources, the need to maintain productive forests and the provision of important ecosystem services by secondary forests highlight the need to promote sustainable management of these systems. I will discuss in particular the main constraints identified in secondary forest management for the production of forest goods and services in highly diverse tropical montane cloud forest landscapes in Mexico, as well as alternatives to overcome these constraints for their sustainable use.

Dra. Tarin Toledo Aceves is a researcher at the Instituto de Ecología A.C. in Mexico. Her work focuses on the ecology and management of tropical montane cloud forests. She is especially interested in tree seedling regeneration and in improving the management of diversity. At the Mexican Commission for the Knowledge and Use of Biodiversity (CONABIO), she coordinated a national-scale initiative to develop a diagnosis of cloud forests in Mexico. She was distinguished by the Rainforest Alliance as a Kleinhans Fellow and is currently a National Geographic Explorer. She has been recently awarded the Georg Föster Fellowship by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation to develop her work on the management and restoration of secondary cloud forests. ​