Densidade da madeira em Minas Gerais: amostragem, espacialização e relação com variáveis ambientais

Abstract

There are reports in literature on the influence of environmental factors over the formation of wood density patterns. Studies with tropical native forests are rare and little conclusive, above all because of the methodological difficulty and large variability of wood density, making prediction and modeling difficult. Therefore, the general objective of this work was to verify if the wood density in native forest formations is related to environmental variables. The data derived from the Forest Inventory of Minas Gerais and are comprised of 1988 trees scaling in all the territory, of which, we removed discs for determining wood density. We used analysis of variance techniques and tools, linear regression and geostatistics to attempt at reaching the objectives. For this, tree articles comprised the present dissertation. It was possible to find a coherent theoretical relation of the wood density with the soil and climate characteristics that condition the different vegetation type in the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil. It was also possible to estimate with precision the density of the shaft with the smaller number of five discs, as long as sampling in specific positions and according to the vegetation type. We also detected that the wood density presents high degree of spatial dependence, being possible to observe patterns numerically correlated with the environmental variables. The density of the wood is strongly related to climatic factors, in a way that, forests subjected to lower precipitation, higher temperature and higher evapotranspiration present the highest wood densities, supposedly suggesting a physiological mechanism to improve the efficiency in the use of water.