Desenvolvimento de árvores nativas em sistema agroflorestal concebido como método de restauração ecológica em área de Reserva Legal

Abstract

Intensive and poorly planned human actions have greatly accelerated forest fragmentation and, therefore, the adaptation of alternative ecological restoration strategies has gained prominence, regarding compliance with the Brazilian environmental law. In this context, agroforestry systems (AFS) have emerged as an alternative, as they can enhance natural regeneration, accelerate the improvement of microbiological and physical-chemical conditions of soils, enable positive interactions, contributing to the rescue of numerous ecosystem attributes, and regional biodiversity increase. We aimed to analyze the growth of native tree species used in a AFS designed in 2017 as an ecological restoration strategy for part of the Legal Reserve of the Agricultural Sciences Center of the Federal University of São Carlos, Araras, SP, evaluating the development of native tree species. We hypothesized that the development of trees would vary between species, even considering that all of them were classified as pioneer species. The AFS has four contiguous plots of 60 m x 18 m, each plot has 120 seedlings of 10 tree species native to seasonal semideciduous forests, with a spacing of 2.0 m between plants, interspersed with coffee seedlings and 6.0 m line spacing. We carried out two samplings - December/2019 and June/2021 -, when we measured the height and diameter of the trees and the death tree percentage. Native species had different growth rates. We found that Guazuma ulmifolia Lam. (Malvaceae) showed greater average growth in height, and Ceiba speciosa (A. St.-Hil.) Ravenna (Malvaceae), the lowest growth and the highest death plant percentage. Considering knowledge in restoration ecology, we argue that results will contribute with technical information about the AFS potential as a restoration strategy and, in this way, small rural producers could generate enough income to cover at least part of the ecological restoration costs on their properties.