Amazonia revealed: a perspective from the Amazon

As Foley et al. indicated (Front Ecol Environ 2007; 5[1]: 25–32), we are now at “a critical point in the history of the Amazon Basin”. The examples provided by the authors clearly show that several of the ecosystem goods and services provided by Amazonian forests are being lost due to deforestation. Given that, at the moment, there is a great need to find viable alternatives to forest destruction, we as researchers and conservationists cannot afford to be unclear about the definitions and concepts we provide to policy makers, funding agencies, and governments. Unfortunately, Foley and his co-authors do not make a clear distinction between forest management and unplanned logging, and seem to argue that selective logging is equivalent to deforestation. Such an image is easily absorbed by a public that associates logging with the large clear-cuts common in northern temperate forests, but this does not coincide with the reality in the tropics, where hyper-diverse forests allow for the selective extraction of a few (1–20) trees per hectare. Foley’s definition therefore does not conform to reality, does not acknowledge the role of forest management as a conservation tool, and completely denies all the advances made in reducing the deleterious impacts of logging. It also assumes that selective logging and outright deforestation have the same negative impacts on ecological services. Although the authors mention four examples of services that are being deteriorated by deforestation and logging, they only present evidence of the effect of logging on carbon storage. They present no evidence for the effect of logging on water flow regulation, regional and global climate regulation, or vector-borne diseases, probably because it is currently unavailable. Advocates of forest management as a tool for conservation will not deny that timber production results in forest damage, but will point out that the amount of damage varies with logging intensity, application of reducedimpact logging techniques, and commitment of the logger to long-term sustainability. While logging damage certainly has impacts on the ecological goods and services provided by forests, these impacts are much smaller than that of deforestation. For example, studies in Guyana have shown that the effect of selective logging on water and nutrient cycling is negligible (ter Steege et al. 1995). The difference in the impact caused by forest management and deforestation lies basically in the fact that forest management allows for the long-term maintenance of vegetation cover, and therefore of many ecological services. It also allows for rapid recovery of vegetative cover, even in areas heavily damaged during logging operations, such as large logging gaps (eg Broadbent et al. 2006). Even in the case where single dominant species have been logged at high intensities, no long-term effects (>75 yr) on forest structure, species composition, or diversity could be detected (ter Steege et al. 2002). There is certainly an urgent need for alternatives to deforestation to guarantee that ecosystem goods and services provided by the Amazon Basin are not lost. Forest management is one of them, if we can manage to put our prejudices aside and if all people committed to forest conservation accept that it is better to have a managed forest than a soybean field or cattle ranch. Marielos Peña-Claros, Zulma Villegas, Rudy Guzman, and Lourens Poorter Instituto Boliviano de Investigación Forestal (IBIF), Santa Cruz, Bolivia (mpena@ibifbolivia.org.bo); Centro Amazónico de Desarrollo Forestal (CADEFOR), Santa Cruz, Bolivia; Wageningen University, Wageningen, Netherlands