Flavia Cassinelli
Yungas forests in North-western Argentina are one of the most threatened environments in the world. Actually, about 90% of the Yungas Forest in Argentina has already been transformed to other land uses and less than 1% is under protection. Thus, some common forest management practices can have a profound negative effect on forest quantity and quality. That’s even worse if you consider that these forests are home of nearly 80% of the biodiversity in the country, and its home of a variety of birds which use trees as foundations for their nests.
Exhaustive logging in Yungas Forest of northwestern Argentina decreases the diversity and abundance of this cavity-nesting birds. This is caused by the fact that these birds use large and well-preserved trees, which are the ones extracted for commercialization.
Yungas screech owl (Megascops hoyi) standing in the entrance of a nestbox. © Dr. Juan Reppucci.
Such birds are important within these forests since they are seed dispersers and plague controllers. Considering the fact that tree's cavities are a key resource, and its availability is reduced due to logging activities, we presented a project involving use of nest boxes which will be a management tool for helping the birds nesting in trees cavities.
Is for this reason that we are trying to generate ecological information through workshops and generating dialogue with forestry companies and local communities regarding the use made by these birds of nest boxes.
In this project we propose construction and setting of nest boxes in Yungas forests in order to increase the populations of this group of birds, and to provide forestry companies and government entities with a management tool for these threatened forests.
Header: Typical landscape of our fieldwork sites.