La Sepultura Biosphere Reserve—created in 1995 in Chiapas, Mexico—is well known for its biodiversity. Its buffer zone, harboring the upper "Tablon" river basin, has been intensively managed by peasants for 48 years. The authors carried out interviews with cattle producers at the Los Angeles ejido, coupled with field surveys of vegetation presence, to determine the nature and allocation of different vegetation associations and their relation to indicators of tree regeneration (sapling presence). The data showed that 96% of the producers surveyed owned areas with open pastures, and 83% owned at least one patch of forested pastures where cattle browse. For oak-forested pastures, the results suggest a trend of high sapling presence with high tree cover. In contrast, for deciduous pastures, the results suggest a trend of high sapling presence with intermediate tree cover. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that woody vegetation within grazing areas may facilitate natural tree recruitment around reserves. Furthermore, these vegetation cover results suggest that within the pasturelands found today in the Los Angeles ejido, some ranchers may be inadvertently conducting practices that are consistent with agro-silvo-pastoral systems.
