The socio-ecological transition can be defined as the set of economic, social and environmental transformations that have occurred in the transition from traditional organic energy-based societies to modern fossil energy-based societies. Forests are spaces that have been intensely affected by these socio-ecological transitions. It seems obvious that a primarily agrarian society whose energy base is firewood will use its forests very differently from an industrial society based on fossil energy that requires other different functions from forests. We understand that the passage between different scenarios has been able to follow diverse trajectories depending on the specific social, economic and environmental characteristics of each territory and that what happened in the Argentine Gran Chaco can provide interesting clues. This project aims to develop a line of research that analyzes specific cases of forest evolution and that allows us to better understand the functioning of the socio-ecological transition, its causes and its effects in different regions of the Gran Chaco. The specific topics may be changes in the surface area occupied by forests (deforestation or reforestation processes) or changes in their composition; The expansion of the agricultural frontier and the effects on forest areas; the change in the economic functionality of forests, either as a source of forest resources of various types, or as spaces linked to leisure or environmental services (for example CO2 absorption); the changes in the forms of management and in the mechanisms of access to forest resources that may have occurred within the framework of the transition. On the other hand, this problem allows approaches at very varied territorial scales, from macro analysis at the country or region scale to micro analyzes focused on the evolution of specific forests.
