Deconstructing of Forest and Woodland

Introduction The definitions for the words “forest” and “woodland” are heterogeneous around the world and are circumscribed to each country´s structural stands in local eco-regions. Countries as Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Chile, China, India, Japan, Mexico or US, with a great diversity of climates and soil conditions attributable to their large land extensions and altitude gradients (Borja-Jimenez et al. 2013), can be identified as territories with high variety of forests and woodlands. The great diversity and diffuse thresholds among ecosystems difficult construction of criteria for their classification into inventories and application of management and conservation policies. Box & Fujiwara (2013) differentiate forests from woodlands: forest is an ecosystem dominated by tall trees, in a closed structure (considered closed when tree crowns are touching) and woodland is an ecosystem dominated by tall or short trees with an open distribution. The etymology of both words has different meanings according to the language. In Chinese, 森林 (sēnlín), the first character, sēn (also mori in Japanese) means “tree”, “forest”, “dark”, “gloomy”; the second character, lín, means “forest”, “grove”, “thicket”, “wood”. Differently, 林地 (líndì) means “wood” (first character) -“land” (second character). It also means “holt” that means “little forest”. The word bosque in Spanish derives from the German word busch meaning “bush”, “shrub”, “jungle”. Different from English, in Spanish the terms