This tree is found throughout the Chaqueña region in Bolivia, north Argentina and Paraguay. The estimated extent of occurrence (286,000 km²) exceeds the thresholds for a threatened category and the area of occupancy is likely to also exceed these thresholds. The overall population size and trend of this species are unknown, although the population size probably also exceeds the thresholds for a threatened category. It is assessed at present as Least Concern. Nevertheless, the Chaco region has been suffering high deforestation rates due to conversion of natural land into pastures and the species could become threatened in the near future if pressure on its habitat increases.

This species is found in the Chaqueña region in Bolivia, north Argentina and Paraguay (Cabrera 1971, Cabrera 1998, POWO 2019) at altitudes between 600 and 1,000 m asl (Freire and Sancho 1996, Zuloaga et al. 2008) and even reaching 2,400 m asl (Hind 2011). Its extent of occurrence (EOO) has been calculated as 286,000 km² and the area of occupancy (AOO) is likely to be larger than 2,000 km².

The overall population size of this species is unknown due to lack of available information. It is common in Sierra de San Javier (Grau et al. 2010) and Valle del Lerma in Argentina (Novara et al. 1995) and in Pulquina, Bolivia (Murakami et al. 2019). Nevertheless, it is suspected that the population has been declining, based on habitat loss.

This species can be a shrub or a tree growing up to 8 m in height (Cabrera 1971, Killeen et al. 1993, Novara et al. 1995). It is found in the Chaqueña region (Cabrera 1971) in sub-Andean and lowland forests (Fuentes Claros 1998), and can be a dominant species in “lomadas” (Grau et al. 2016). In Bolivia, it is found throughout a variety of habitats, including on rocky areas in the inter-Andean valleys, semi-arid inter-Andean woodlands and inter-Andean dry forest (Hind 2011). It has been collected mainly in the Dry Chaco, Bolivian montane dry forests and Southern Andean Yungas ecoregions (Dinerstein et al. 2017).

The main threat to this species is habitat loss due to large-scale livestock farming. The Chaco forests have one of the highest global deforestation rates (Hansen et al. 2013), with a transformation of 15.8 million ha of the original Dry Chaco into croplands or pastures (Vallejos et al. 2015). Paraguay has the highest deforestation rate in the region (Vallejos et al. 2015), with an estimated loss of more than 27% of its Chaco natural forest between 1987 and 2012, mainly due to conversion to pastures (Baumann et al. 2017), and with high fragmentation of the remaining forest (Mereles and Rodas 2014). In Argentina, 1.4 million ha of dry forest were lost between 1972 and 2007 (Gasparri and Grau 2009) and, in Bolivia, 492,000 ha suffered land-cover change (Killeen et al. 2007).

The wood of this species is often used in turnery as a substitute for palo santo (Grau et al. 2016). It is also used for posts in the construction of circular silos for storage grains in Bolivia (Kent 1998), and there are reports of medicinal uses to treat hematomas, rheumatism, pulmonary disorders and as an antisiphyllitic (Scarpa and Rosso 2019).