Climate-induced changes to provisioning ecosystem services in rural socioecosystems in Mexico

Extreme climatic events are changing the structure and functioning of forests worldwide, and often reducing abruptly their capacity to provide ecosystem services, especially to rural communities intimately connected to their environment. In this paper, we analyze climate-induced changes to provisioning ecosystem services, including forest resources available and used by rural communities, and local perceptions about how these services changed after recent extreme climatic events inside and outside a Biosphere Reserve in northwestern Mexico. Our approach integrates quantitative and qualitative techniques from traditional (50 local interviews) and scientific (forest surveys in 24 1-ha plots) ecological knowledge. Our integrated analysis suggests widespread tree mortality was the main ecological effect of recent extreme climatic events, especially in forests regrowing in the reserve former agricultural land, overturning decades of forest natural regeneration. Reserve inhabitants, strongly relying on their surrounding forests for self-consumption, identified climatic events as the main driver of forest change. In addition to climatic events, people outside the reserve recognized selective logging for charcoal production and in general forest exploitation as key drivers of forest change, consistent with the decline of hardwood species revealed by our field surveys. The persistence of an eroding environmental dimension (e.g., unsustainable use of forest resources) outside reserves could increase the long-term vulnerability of rural socioecosystems to extreme climatic events. The protecting role of biosphere reserves will be essential to preserve old-growth forests more resistant to temperature extremes and aid the process of forest natural regeneration after climate-induced disturbance. In order to protect native biodiversity and reduce climate vulnerability, coupled human-environment systems such as Biosphere Reserves should genuinely and rightfully engage local people in management decisions, prioritizing policies that build more sustainable livelihoods and enhance the adaptive capacity of socioecosystems to cope with climate variability.