Native Forest Land Management: Zoning results performed by North argentinean provinces

Abstract

Argentina has several experiences on Land Planning, but so far there is not an integral normative. A key background experience is the land use planning of native forest act (26331) from 2007.The aim of this study was to evaluate the experiences of zoning of the provinces of Santiago del Estero, Chaco, Formosa and Salta in the context of this act. We characterize the way the 10 criteria of environmental sustainability were considered by the four provinces, and we quantitatively compared the zoning maps on the provincial boundaries. The interpretation of the criteria of environmental sustainability differed, in part, because the different provinces did not use the same level of detail. Salta and Chaco considered a higher level of detail on these criteria than the rest. The comparison of the way forests were categorized showed that the highest concordance corresponded to the Santiago del Estero - Chaco border (58.3%). All the other pairs of neighbor provinces presented a significantly lower concordance: 24.76% between Chaco and Salta, 20.65% between Formosa and Salta, 10.54% between Chaco and Formosa and 1.28% between Salta and Santiago del Estero. Our results suggest that the zoning has not been consistent due to the low agreement on the categorization of forests among provinces.