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).
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