Juarez City.– Chihuahua is the state with the largest forest area in the country and, within this, it has the second largest extension of “secondary” vegetation, or that “that shows signs of disturbance or that has been modified or eliminated.”
According to the most recent edition of the “State that preserves the forestry sector in Mexico”, corresponding to the year 2023 and released in recent days by the federal government, it is 4 million 58 thousand 18 hectares (has), or 18.8 percent percent of the 21.6 million forest hectares in the entity.
This extension of “secondary” vegetation in Chihuahua is surpassed only by that of Oaxaca, where it is 4.5 million hectares which, for that demarcation, represents 68 percent of the forest territory, of 6.6 million hectares.
“Areas with secondary vegetation are the result, mainly, of the alteration of primary vegetation or secondary forests, so they are directly linked to degradation processes,” says the report, prepared by the National Forestry Commission (Conafor).
“Agricultural expansion, fires and mining are the main drivers of primary forest loss. It is estimated that more than two-thirds of the country’s forest area (68.7 percent) corresponds to primary vegetation, while the rest (31.3 percent) is considered secondary vegetation,” he adds.
When mentioning entities with more than half of the vegetation of the second type, such as Chiapas, Colima, Guanajuato, Guerrero, Hidalgo, Jalisco, Morelos, Puebla, Veracruz and Yucatán, the report explains that the data provide elements “for the establishment of interventions public in matters of restoration or rehabilitation of forest areas.”
The document also observes that the 21.6 hectares of forest in Chihuahua are the largest area in the country and that, of these, 7 million correspond to forests, or 32.4 percent in the state and that they are also the largest area of this type of flora in the Republic.
Only Durango comes close in terms of forested territory, with 5.1 million hectares, and Sonora in terms of total forest hectares, with 14.9 million hectares, which, in the second case, 66 percent are xeric or desert scrub.
Of this type of dry climate vegetation, in Chihuahua there are 8.5 million hectares, or 39.4 percent, while another 510.9 hectares, or 2.4 percent, are “jungle,” an ecosystem on which, separately, the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (Inegi) says that it is found in “very localized” areas of the southwest mountain range, such as the bottoms of the ravines on the Pacific slopes.
“At a general level, this information allows us to highlight the entities that have the largest forest area: highlighting Chihuahua, Sonora, Coahuila, Durango and Baja California Sur which, together, represent close to half of the national forest area (48.8 percent ),” the document says.
“Mexico’s temperate forests are distributed mainly in the country’s mountain ranges (…) This type of vegetation represents more than 60 percent of the entity’s forest area in Mexico City, Mexico and Tlaxcala. In Aguascalientes, Chihuahua, Durango, Guanajuato, Guerrero, Hidalgo, Jalisco, Nayarit, Oaxaca and Querétaro it is also the ecosystem with the largest surface area and represents between 32 and 60% of the forest surface of the entity,” he adds.
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