Agrosilviculturas tradicionales que mantienen la diversidad vegetal nativa del Valle de Tehuacán-Cuicatlán: un panorama regional

Abstract

Background: Traditional agroforestry systems (AFS) can maintain native plant diversity through different peasant practices. Questions: How much AFS maintain the composition, diversity and abundance of perennial plants? What variations are there among different types of vegetation? Studied species: Perennial plant species occurring in AFS associated with columnar cacti forests, temperate forests, thorn forests, rosetophyllous forests and tropical deciduous forests. Study site and dates: 13 communities of the Tehuacán-Cuicatlán Valley, in Oaxaca and Puebla, Mexico. Revision of works and own data published between 2010 and 2020. Methods: We evaluated the floristic composition, diversity conservation capacity and abundance of individuals by means of a redundancy analysis, the estimation of effective numbers of species and generalized linear models in 30 AFS and 30 samples of the wild vegetation from which they derive. Results: The AFS analyzed can maintain 68 % of the species richness and 34 % of the individuals of perennial plants present in the surrounding wild vegetation. The AFS and wild vegetation are similar in terms of species composition and diversity, although in the case of the thorn forest there is a clear reduction in the number of species and a change in the composition. The abundance of individuals is notoriously lower in the AFS. Conclusions: The AFS are an alternative capable of safeguarding a significant part of the native plant diversity of the Tehuacán-Cuicatlán Valley. The fair valuation and promotion of agroecological peasant management through AFS should be considered in the policies of biodiversity conservation.