Limitantes y avances para alcanzar el manejo forestal sostenible en las Yungas Australes.

Until now, the Southern Yungas forests have been managed only to provide wood from a few economically valuable tree species. Successive reentries without considering the time needed for the ecosystem to recover led to a degradation and simplification of great proportion of the Southern Yungas, making these forests more susceptible to transformation to other land-uses. For this reason, an early adoption of guidelines for sustainable forest management, including the wide range of values that these forests provide (e.g., biodiversity and ecosystem services), is needed. Currently, guidelines to attain a sustainable yield of wood and decrease the negative effects of logging are available, and also a great amount of information has been developed to start delineating sustainable forest management guidelines for other values of the Southern Yungas forest. However, these guidelines have been mainly ignored in the Southern Yungas due to, in our opinion, primarily, a lack of a socio-economic and political scenario framed in a long-term forest policy is set. It is necessary to provide economic compensations that promote land-owners to shift to sustainable forest management activities. An alternative should be to recognize and pay for the diverse ecosystem services that the Southern Yungas provide. To implement sustainable forest management guidelines will ensure that these forests continue providing multiple goods and services that benefit local stakeholders which depend on the Southern Yungas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]