Efeitos do manejo florestal sustentável sobre a deposição de serapilheira em uma floresta de terra firme da Amazônia brasileira.

Abstract

Rainforests are home to over 30% of the planet's biodiversity and perform important environmental functions. Despite this, these forests have been suffering great threats, mainly by human interventions. Sustainable forest management emerges as an alternative to using forest resources causing the least possible impact, but this activity still causes changes in some ecosystem processes, among them the litter deposition, which is of fundamental importance in maintaining soil fertility in tropical florests. Thus, the objective of this work was to analyze the effects of sustainable forest management on litter deposition rate in a dryland forest in the Brazilian Amazon. For this, collectors were installed in four managed areas and one control area, being 20 collectors of 0.25 m² per sampled area. The collectors were installed in 30 m long transects, delimited 100 m from the main access road to each sampled area. The material obtained in each collector was weighed. The litter deposition values obtained for each sampled area were submitted to the normality and homoscedasticity test. Once the assumptions were met, the data were subjected to analysis of variance (ANOVA), adopting a significance level of 95% (p ≤ 0.05). In the obtained results, the study areas presented an average litter deposition of 8,858 Mg.ha.month-1. The leaf fraction presented the largest contribution in the total litter deposition, with an average of 7,243 Mg.ha.month-1. Thus, the areas subjected to forest exploitation in different years did not show significant difference in litter deposition compared to the unexplored area, as well as the monthly litter deposition did not show significant differences between the months analyzed.