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Despite regional deforestation threats, the state of Quintana Roo has maintained over 80% of its territory in forests. Community forest management (CFM) has played a pivotal role in forest cover and biodiversity conservation in the region. In this article, we present the institutional, socioeconomic and environmental conditions under which community-based forest management has been consolidated in the tropical state of Quintana Roo, which occupies the eastern half of Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula. With a focus on management for timber and other market-based development strategies, we then examine the institutional and socioeconomic factors, as well as biophysical shocks, that have constrained community forestry development in the past 25 years, challenging its persistence. Following, we discuss how forest communities and institutions have responded and adapted to changing forest policies and markets as well as major environmental shocks from hurricanes and fires. CFM in Quintana Roo has shown resiliency since its institutionalization 30 years ago. Future challenges and opportunities include biodiversity conservation, carbon management through Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation 4296(REDD+) initiatives, market strengthening, business management training as well as the implementation of alternative silvicultural systems, particularly to manage sustainable populations of commercial timber species.

In the state of Veracruz, Mexico, lowland and marginal coffee growing regions have been particularly vulnerable since the 1989 coffee crisis. Government programs have promoted production diversification as a strategy to improve local incomes and conserve environmentally beneficial shade-tree coffee agroforests. We present results on land use/ land cover dynamics in the municipality of Zozocolco de Hidalgo from 1973 to 2006. The municipality is recognized for its indigenous population and poverty, and currently, diversification efforts are being implemented. Our study combines remote sensing and GIS analyses, binary logistic regression and econometric modeling, as well as socioeconomic surveys to evaluate land use/land cover change (LULCC) dynamics and explore potential environmental and socioeconomic drivers. Results show that tree cover and coffee agroforests had largely been conserved during the first decade after the coffee crisis. But, recent trends indicate loss of tree cover in coffee agroforests and their conversion mostly to pasture. Land use/land cover drivers are largely explained by spatially explicit environmental variables such as slope and elevation. Relevant socioeconomic variables such as distance to markets and land use profitability were not significantly related to land use changes in Zozocolco. Surveys revealed that many households had converted coffee agroforests to pasture or agriculture in the past decade and others intended on renting or selling their agroforest plots, mostly for conversion to pasture. Diversification programs may not be sufficient to stem deforestation in lowland and marginal coffee growing regions. Moreover, information about locally varying socioeconomic and cultural contexts needs to be strongly considered in order to formulate effective strategies.