摘要
Determining underlying factors that foster deforestation and delineating forest areas by levels of susceptibility are of the main challenges when defining policies for forest management and planning at regional scale. The susceptibility to deforestation of remaining forest ecosystems （shrubland, temperate forest and rainforest） was conducted in the state of San Luis Potosi, located in north central Mexico. Spatial analysis techniques were used to detect the deforested areas in the study area during 1993-2007. Logistic regression was used to relate explana- tory variables （such as social, investment, forest production, biophysical and proximity factors） with susceptibility to deforestation to construct predictive models with two focuses： general and by biogeographical zone In all models, deforestation has positive correlation with distance to rainfed agriculture, and negative correlation with slope, distance to roads and distance to towns. Other variables were significant in some cases, but in others they had dual relationships, which varied in each biogeographi- cal zone. The results show that the remaining rainforest of Huasteca region is highly susceptible to deforestation. Both approaches show that more than 70% of the current rainforest area has high and very high levels of susceptibility to deforestation. The values represent a serious concern with global warming whether tree carbon is released to atmos- phere. However, after some considerations, encouraging forest environ- mental services appears to be the best alternative to achieve sustainableforest management.
Determining underlying factors that foster deforestation and delineating forest areas by levels of susceptibility are of the main challenges when defining policies for forest management and planning at regional scale. The susceptibility to deforestation of remaining forest ecosystems （shrubland, temperate forest and rainforest） was conducted in the state of San Luis Potosi, located in north central Mexico. Spatial analysis techniques were used to detect the deforested areas in the study area during 1993-2007. Logistic regression was used to relate explana- tory variables （such as social, investment, forest production, biophysical and proximity factors） with susceptibility to deforestation to construct predictive models with two focuses： general and by biogeographical zone In all models, deforestation has positive correlation with distance to rainfed agriculture, and negative correlation with slope, distance to roads and distance to towns. Other variables were significant in some cases, but in others they had dual relationships, which varied in each biogeographi- cal zone. The results show that the remaining rainforest of Huasteca region is highly susceptible to deforestation. Both approaches show that more than 70% of the current rainforest area has high and very high levels of susceptibility to deforestation. The values represent a serious concern with global warming whether tree carbon is released to atmos- phere. However, after some considerations, encouraging forest environ- mental services appears to be the best alternative to achieve sustainableforest management.
