Linking biodiversity, ecosystem services, and beneficiaries of tropical dry forests of Latin America: Review and new perspectives
Graphical abstract
Section snippets
Study area
TDFs in Latin America occupy a wide latitudinal range across 14 countries, from the north in Mexico to the south in Bolivia and are characterized by a wide range of environmental conditions, with an annual rainfall varying from 250 to 2000 mm, 4 to 6 dry months (with rainfall less than 100 mm), and a mean annual temperature varying from 20 to 27 °C (Dirzo et al., 2011). In Latin America, the TDFs occupy an area of 519,597 km2 (Portillo-Quintero and Sánchez-Azofeifa, 2010), of which 203,884 km2
Bibliometric analysis
The number of studies that link biodiversity, ecosystem services and beneficiaries has increased slightly in the last decade (Fig. 1a). The oldest study was from 1997, and 2016 was the year with the largest number of studies published in our database (11). We found that most of the studies (75%) were published in English, while 24% were published in Spanish, the remaining percentage was published in both languages and we did not find studies in Portuguese. Ten of the 14 Latin American countries
Discussion
Our results show that very few studies evaluate the links between biodiversity, ecosystem services and beneficiaries together in TDF of Latin America. This probably because original primary research data that address all these links together (biodiversity, ecosystem services and beneficiaries) in the same study is still scarce globally (Lu et al, 2018). Lu et al. (2018) pointed out that studies from the nature science perspective have made great progress in linking ecosystem structure and
Conclusions
We have shown that the interest in the links between biodiversity, ecosystem services and the beneficiaries of the TDFs of Latin America has increased in the last two decades. But the emphasis is on the link between biodiversity and ecosystem services, while other links remains scarcely addressed. There is a clear tendency towards studies that focus on recognizing and evaluating the supply and use of provisioning and regulation services, which are generated by the abundance and richness of
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