Subtropical Dry Forests: The Main Forest Ecoregion of Argentina
The Chaco is a sparsely populated, wooded grassland natural region of the Río de la Plata basin, where four physiognomic regions can be identified: Humid Chaco, Semi-arid Chaco, Arid Chaco, and Chaco Serrano. In this introduction to the section of subtrop
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Subtropical Dry Forests: The Main Forest Ecoregion of Argentina Aníbal Verga and Diego López Lauenstein
8.1 M ain Physiographic and Physiognomic Features of the Argentine Chaco According to the Royal Spanish Academy (https://dle.rae.es/chaco), the word “chaco” is derived from the Quechua word “chacu.” “Chacu” refers to a type of hunting historically done by indigenous communities in South America in which hunters would circle around the targeted animal before closing in to kill it. This etymology reflects the cultural rather than geographical meaning of the term, highlighting that the Chaco is not merely a territory, but the vital space of an ancestral human group. The Great American Chaco is a sparsely populated, lowland natural region of the Río de la Plata basin, of approximately 850,000 km2 divided among eastern Bolivia, western Paraguay, northern Argentina, and a small portion of southern Brazil. It extends into both tropical and temperate zones and is one of the major wooded grasslands in South America (Pacheco Balanza et al. 2012; Spensley et al. 2013). The Argentine portion occupies approximately 60% of the total surface of the Great American Chaco, and for the country, it represents the largest native forest area. The rainfall regime is monsoonal, with concentrated rains during the summer (between October and March). The entire region is between the mean annual precipitation contour lines of 1200 and 300 mm (Fig. 8.1). In general, the gradient goes from the A. Verga (*) Agencia de Extensión Rural INTA, La Rioja, Argentina Instituto de Fisiología y Recursos Genéticos Vegetales, Unidad de Estudios Agropecuarios (IFRGV, UDEA) INTA-CONICET, Córdoba, Argentina e-mail: [email protected] D. López Lauenstein Instituto de Fisiología y Recursos Genéticos Vegetales, Unidad de Estudios Agropecuarios (IFRGV, UDEA) INTA-CONICET, Córdoba, Argentina © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. J. Pastorino, P. Marchelli (eds.), Low Intensity Breeding of Native Forest Trees in Argentina, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56462-9_8
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Fig. 8.1 Great American Chaco in South America and the Argentinean sector considered in this Chapter (a) (Spensley et al. 2013). Argentine Chaco and its neighbor phytogeographic regions (Cabrera 1976) over a map of mean annual precipitation contour plots (Hijmans et al. 2005) (b)
most humid sites in the east, to the driest ones in the west and is the main factor in defining the subregions and productive activities, also marking a steep climatic gradient (Spensley et al. 2013). The humid Chaco subregion is the area between 1200 and 700–800 mm of annual precipitation, the semi-arid or subhumid Chaco is that between 700–800 mm and 500 mm, while the arid Chaco subregion lies between 500 and 300 mm. On the other hand, the Chaco Serrano region includes the Chaco vegetation that ascends the slopes of the Pampas Sierras located on the extreme west and southwest (Cabrera 1976). Except for the Pampas Sierras, the Chaco is an enormous plain with a ve
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