Current Status
Consumer demand for big-leaf mahogany has driven boom-and-bust logging cycles for centuries, depleting local and regional supplies from Mexico to Bolivia. Approximately 58 million hectares (21%) of mahogany’s historic range in South America (278 million hectares total) had been lost to forest conversion by 2001. Commercial populations had been logged from at least 125 million more hectares, reducing the current commercial range to 94 million hectares (34% of historic). Surviving mahogany stocks are extremely low-density populations in remote regions of Amazonia representing a smaller fraction of historic stocks than would be expected based on estimated current commercial range.
The following country-level descriptions of big-leaf mahogany’s current commercial range in South America are excerpted from Martinez et al. (2008).
Read more about this topic: Swietenia Macrophylla
Famous quotes containing the words current and/or status:
““I” is a militant social tendency, working to hold and enlarge its place in the general current of tendencies. So far as it can it waxes, as all life does. To think of it as apart from society is a palpable absurdity of which no one could be guilty who really saw it as a fact of life.”
—Charles Horton Cooley (1864–1929)
“What is clear is that Christianity directed increased attention to childhood. For the first time in history it seemed important to decide what the moral status of children was. In the midst of this sometimes excessive concern, a new sympathy for children was promoted. Sometimes this meant criticizing adults. . . . So far as parents were put on the defensive in this way, the beginning of the Christian era marks a revolution in the child’s status.”
—C. John Sommerville (20th century)