Camera trap videos capture biodiversity of conservation area in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula

Ejidos are part of a land tenure system in Mexico by which land is communally managed by local villages. Many ejidos, such as Ejido Caoba in the state of Quintana Roo on the Yucatán Peninsula, run sustainable forestry enterprises on their land, harvesting and selling wood for the benefit of the entire community and replanting the trees they cut down in order to ensure the health of the ecosystem as a whole. One way to measure how well an ecosystem has been maintained is through the levels of biodiversity the land is capable of sustaining — and by that measure, Ejido Caoba’s efforts to preserve the ecosystem appear to be quite successful, as the camera trap videos below suggest. There are 311 ejidatarios in Ejido Caoba who collectively manage the nearly 68,000 hectares of land owned by the community. Ejido Caoba has been certified for sustainable forest management by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) for the past 25 years. On a recent visit to the ejido, Pedro Pablo Chay Cocom, the current president of Ejido Caoba, told Mongabay that the community makes more money selling its wood on the international market than it does domestically, which is why FSC certification is so important. “Without certification,” Chocom said, “selling wood would be very hard.” In 2016, for instance, the ejido sold $173,000-worth of certified mahogany to U.S.-based Gibson Guitars. The following year, the community planted 26,000 new trees of a variety of species, including 19,300 mahogany trees, 2,600 ciricote, and 3,900…

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