| This research was performed in the northern state of Durango, Mexico to evaluate the role of forest communities in the management and conservation of natural resources. The communities, referred as ejidos, are classified as common-based property regimes and occupy almost 80 percent of the forest lands in the state. The general objectives of this study were: (1) to identify and evaluate the most important factors driving deforestation in ejido communities and (2) to provide and demonstrate a practical framework to formulate and solve a multiobjective decision-making approach that help resource managers to better manage ejidos' forest resources. In the first objective, an econometric model is presented to predict the probability of having deforested conditions among several explanatory variables in a randomly-selected sample of 99 ejidos. In the second objective, a distance-based multiobjective decision-making technique is used to determine the level of forest management of a particular ejido to achieve various management objectives simultaneously.; Data for this research came from various government institutions, survey methods, spatial-derived information, and forest inventory data. Results show that deforestation is more likely to happen in poor ejidos where potential agricultural lands are closer to roads, towns, and markets. The study determined preferred forest structures that best satisfy, in a compromise sense, the set of management objectives involved. These forest structures, expressed in terms of tree basal area, number of trees per hectare, and quadratic mean diameter, addressed the effects of temporal and spatial variability of forest systems on management decision-making. The work also explains the effect of past forest management schemes and other forest disturbances on current and future forest conditions.; This study recommends more research in the relationship between forest degradation and community development, particularly in the fields of distribution of goods and services among present and future generations of ejidatarios. More research is also necessary to determine the empirical relationship between management objectives (e.g., recreation, scenic beauty, water quality) and the decision variables (tree basal area, number of trees, and quadratic mean diameter) or other related stand attributes. |
