Maya Forest

The Maya Forest is a tropical moist broadleaf forest that covers much of the Yucatan Peninsula, thereby encompassing Belize, northern Guatemala, and southeastern Mexico. It is deemed the second largest tropical rainforest in the Americas, after the Amazon, with an area of circa 15 million hectares (150,000 km2), of which at least 3 million (30,000 km2) lie within protected areas.

Extent
The Maya Forest is considered 'the [second] largest remaining tropical rainforest in the Americas,' after the Amazon. It is widely deemed to cover much of the Yucatan Peninsula, thereby encompassing Belize, northern Guatemala, and southeastern Mexico, and stretching across protected and unprotected areas, and Crown (ie public) and private lands. This coincides with the original definition of the Forest as developed in 1995 for internationally-coordinated conservation efforts, namely, the contiguous tropical rainforest which housed the Classic Maya civilisation within the Maya Lowlands. Some literature, however, the Forest's bounds to only contiguous rainforest within protected areas (eg the Maya Biosphere Reserve and abutting protected areas). Other literature, though, the Forest's bounds beyond the Peninsula, suggesting it stretches along the Gulf of Mexico littoral beyond the Isthmus of Tehuantepec to the west, and along the Bay of Honduras littoral along northern Honduras to the east.

Pre-Columbian
The Maya Forest is thought to have come into being after the Last Glacial Maximum circa 20,000 years ago. Prior to such event, an arid climate is thought to have predominated in the Maya Lowlands, leading to dry, open savannahs, rather than a tropical rainforest.

The earliest Palaeoindian settlers of the former Maya Lowlands would have encountered a burgeoning Maya Forest, and employed it to hunt and gather food, thereby leaving it largely intact. Their successors, the Maya, were once thought to have similarly kept the Forest in a largely virginal state, but scholarly consensus has flipped on this point. It is now thought that Preclassic or Classic Maya residents deforested large tracts of the Forest for residential and agricultural use, with recovery possible only after the Classic Maya Collapse.

Columbian
The Maya's successors, the Spanish in Guatemala and Mexico, and the Baymen in Belize, took to logging the Forest since their arrival during the conquest of Yucatan and later settlement of Belize and conquest of Peten. Though centuries of timber extraction may not have decimated the Forest, they did alter it, for instance, via selective extraction of logwood and mahogany.

Modern conservation efforts were begun in 1817 with the passage of the Crown Lands Ordinance, which regulated logging in the southeastern portion of the Forest, within British Honduran Crown lands. The earliest protected areas within the Forest are believed to have been the Silk Grass or Mountain Pine Ridge Forest Reserves, gazetted in 1920, both in the southeastern portion of the Forest, within British Honduras. Conservation efforts were not coordinated across state lines, however, until 1995, when a workshop to such end was held at the Colegio de la Frontera Sur in Campeche, Mexico, by the US Man and Biosphere Programme.

Presently, forest fires, illegal logging, illicit trafficking of flora and fauna, and intensive agriculture are thought to pose 'great threats' to the Forest. A recent study, for instance, found that twenty-first century deforestation has fragmented the Forest, thereby undermining its contiguity. It has been noted, furthermore, that mitigating said threats has proven challenging, given frosty diplomatic relations between Forest-holding states, most especially Belize and Guatemala.

Physical
The Forest is a contiguous maze of woods with pockets of savannahs, wetlands, and coastal mangrove stands.

Human
As of the 2010s, the Forest houses a population of approximately 588,000 to 600,000 people in non-protected areas, including Maya, Garifuna, mestizo, and Mennonite residents. The Forest comprises various protected and unprotected tracts of woods, and itself constitutes the northernmost part of the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor.

Ecology
The Maya Forest comprises more than 20 ecosystems.

It is home to a wide range of animals, including jaguars, monkeys, parrots, tapirs, snakes and crocodiles.

Legacy
The Forest has been deemed 'one of the most important ecological systems globally[, it being] considered the most extensive tropical forest in Mesoamerica[, with] a surface of protected areas that exceeds four million hectares [40,000 sq km].'