Padrões espaço-temporais do estrato arbóreo de um ramanescente de floresta ombrófila densa na Serra da Mantiqueira, Minas Gerais

Abstract

Comprehending the relations between the various elements of a forest ecosystem is fundamental to subsidize recovery plans in degraded areas, elaborate conservation strategies and management plans, and visualize future sceneries considering the scarcity or lack of some of these elements. Such comprehension is better achieved when robust and sophisticated data analysis techniques, such as ordination multivariate analysis, geostatistical analysis and multiple regression, are available. In order to contribute to better understanding the relations in forest ecosystems, the present dissertation, developed in a Dense Ombrophylous Forest in Bocaina de Minas, in the Serra da Mantiqueira, had the objectives of: (1) presenting the temporal variations in the structure, forest composition and forest diversity; (2) verify how much of the variations existent in the forest are explained by topographic, soil and climatic variables; (3) verify the potential of soil superficial organic matter as an auxiliary variable in the organic matter depth and carbon in the vegetation shaft spatial predictions; and (4) evaluate the spatial continuity of chemical and texture soil attributes in the forest in question. In order to do this, multivariate, geostatistical and modeling techniques were used. The results point to a forest in initial construction phase of the silvigenesis process, with an increase in the density of individuals and basal area, in which the variations existant in terms of species, biomass and dynamics substitution along the forest are expressed in altitude gradient (which condenses other gradients, especially that of conservation and soil). Though the soil’s superficial organic matter, used as a co-variable in cokriging of the vegetation’s carbon reserve, does not present gain in spatial interpolation precision, it was shown efficient for generating maps similar to those generated by ordinary kriging, and may perform better in different scales. The soil variables presented spatial continuity structure connected to the area’s topographical and conservation conditions.