Cedar and Mahogany Logging in Eastern Peru

TN SCATTERED areas of the Amazon Basin, removed from concentrations of activity along major rivers, small parties of natives and mestizos are extracting valuable timbers. Work is done without the assistance of power machines or animals and without direct financial support from corporate or governmental sources. Wood production per enterprise is generally low because numerous inconveniences, including environmental hazards and a prejudicial system of financing, bear heavily upon activities. My purposes in examining this form of tropical logging are to provide a record of a rudimentary human industry that has largely escaped the detailed attention of geographers and foresters and to determine the nature and permanence of the disturbance caused by such logging. In this study a frontier area of Spanish cedar (Cedrela odorata) and mahogany (Swietenia macrophylla) logging along the lower Urubamba River in eastern Peru will be considered (Fig. i). The natural vegetation of the region, almost entirely intact, is seasonal rain forest with an uneven but relatively high canopy. The tallest emergents reach 40 meters in height and 2 to 2.5 meters in diameter. At ground level the aspect is generally open. The intermediate and upper levels of the forest are laced with large vines and lianas, and tree trunks sometimes carry extravagant loads of epiphytes. Although characteristic associations of a few species are often noted along riverbanks and in swampy areas, plant composition is generally mixed. Climax associations on the Urubamba may consist of as many as a hundred species of large trees.1 The implications of this extreme heterogeneity for the conduct of logging operations will be considered more fully below. The climate is subhumid tropical, with a yearly average temperature of 26?C. Rains extend from October to April or May, reaching their greatest intensity in December and January. They are followed by a dry season of four or five months, which becomes severe only in July and August. Annual precipitation totals are not available, but they probably range between 1,5oo and 2,200 millimeters.2 The terrain directly adjacent to the Urubamba is flat for widths of various miles downstream and narrows upstream to mere sandbars in the Pongo de Mainique, a deep gorge that separates the Andean foothills from the Amazon Basin. Farther removed from the floodplain are low but highly dissected hills. Along the Urubamba tributaries, particularly in their upper reaches, broken terrain borders the stream directly, forming massive rock and clay cliffs. The elevation of the Urubamba in the study area ranges from 300 meters above sea level at Sepahua to approximately 500 meters at the Yavero River. Slight, localized uplift still occurs, accounting for the active stream downcutting and dissected landscape that covers much of the region

Agroforestry · Archaeology · Geography · Illegal logging · Logging · Botany and Geology in Latin America and Caribbean · Environmental and Cultural Studies in Latin America and Beyond · Environmental Science · Forestry · Plant Taxonomy and Phylogenetics

• Human Geography of the American Tropics

  Open Access•Kent Mathewson•Singapore Journal of Tropical…•1993

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• Social and environmental impacts of big-leaf mahogany (Swietenia macrophylla) logging on Peruvian indigenous communities

  Aaron A Groth, Aaron A P Groth•2014

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