Biodiversidade local como ferramenta para a restauração ambiental

Abstract

Human action on environment results in great changes on landscape and ecological dynamics in regional and global scale, having influence on other species life. In this context, habitat substitution - from a heterogeneous environment, with various trophic levels occupied by large range of organisms, to a more homogeneous one, widely shown on mechanical agriculture fields - tends to decrease diversity and impact on species survival. Besides, we count with less preservation areas than the ideal. Environments that used to be continuous have been turned into isolated habitats, now islands, amongst vast areas of farming land or other forms of human occupation. In this work we observed the results inherent to the application of nucleation techniques of environmental restoration - Artificial Perches - on a fragmented area in Seasonal Semideciduous Forest, within the Ivinhema River watershed region. We started from the initial hypothesis that there is a relation between the remaining avifauna and resilience – the regenerative power of a natural environment after disturbance - of the area, via seed dispersal. The aim was to evaluate the colonization capacity of remaining plant species on the degraded area. We used artificial perches and quantified the seeds found below them, finding 441 seeds with zoological dispersal characteristics, most of them belonging to Cecropia and Ficus genus, important plants occurring during the first stages o environmental restoration. The second chapter presents an avifauna survey of the area identifying the actors of seed dispersal. 48 species were found, belonging to several trophic guilds, but with a concentration on the more generalist guilds, pointing to the high degraded characteristics of the area.