XVI International Botanical Congess

Humans have been an important factor in environmental change. Their long-term success in providing food for their growing population became closely linked to their ability to manage the changes for their benefit without affecting their capacity to sustain the population. We will review some activities that have been responsible for the conservation of a high biodiversity that we enjoy today and that is threatened by our new ways to transform nature. We will review four groups of traditional Aconservation@ practices that seemed to have been responsible for the maintenance and enrichment of the biodiversity of the Maya region: 1) management of vegetation for agriculture and silviculture purposes (milpa), 2) creation of agroforestry systems (forest gardens), 3) conservation of genetic resources (home gardens) and an 4) ethnobotanical knowledge base.