title: Perspectives on secondary forest management in tropical humid lowland America.
abstract: Secondary forests regrowing on abandoned agricultural land constitute an important, albeit widely overlooked, component in the landscape matrix of tropical lowland America. These 'new' forest resources on private land-holdings derive either from unsustainable cattle-ranching practices of better-off farmers or are part of the crop/fallow system of resource-poor farmers. If previous land use was light, secondary forest management may offer an interesting use option to better-off farmers, providing that subsidies for stand improvement are given. Improved fallow systems using partly the successional vegetation may be a way to establish sustainable small-scale agriculture for resource-poor farmers. Given some technical and financial input, land-use systems based on secondary vegetation could play a vital role both in sustainable landscape management and biodiversity conservation.
authors.affiliation: Institute for World Forestry, Federal Research Centre for Forestry and Forest Products, Leuschnerstr. 91, D-2103 hamburg, Germany. kammesheidt@holz.uni-hamburg.de
authors.forename: Ludwig
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Kammesheidt
mesh_terms: D000383:Agriculture; D000818:Animals; D000835:Animals, Wild; D017691:Caribbean Region; D002417:Cattle; D002489:Central America; D003247:Conservation of Natural Resources; D016468:Forestry; D011157:Population Dynamics; D013020:South America; D014329:Tropical Climate