Modeling Potential Impacts of Planting Palms or Tree in Small Holder Fruit Plantations on Ecohydrological Processes in the Central Amazon†
1
Department for Biogeochemical Processes, Max-Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry, Jena 07745, Germany
2
Laboratory of Ecohydrology, College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 505781, USA
3
Laboratory of Forest Management, National Institute for Research in the Amazon, Manaus 69060-001, Brazil
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
†
A short version of this manuscript has been previously published as conference paper [1] at the 9th International Workshop on Sap Flow in Ghent, Belgium. An extensive analysis and a modeling approach was added to the original paper.
Academic Editors: Ge Sun and James M. Vose
Forests 2015, 6(8), 2530-2544; https://doi.org/10.3390/f6082530
Received: 9 June 2015 / Revised: 12 July 2015 / Accepted: 22 July 2015 / Published: 27 July 2015
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Forest Management and Water Resources in the Anthropocene)
Native fruiting plants are widely cultivated in the Amazon, but little information on their water use characteristics can be found in the literature. To explore the potential impacts of plantations on local to regional water balance, we studied plant water use characteristics of two native fruit plants commonly occurring in the Amazon region. The study was conducted in a mixed fruit plantation containing a dicot tree species (Cupuaçu, Theobroma grandiflorum) and a monocot palm species (Açai, Euterpe oleracea) close to the city of Manaus, in the Central Amazon. Scaling from sap flux measurements, palms had a 3.5-fold higher water consumption compared to trees with a similar diameter. Despite the high transpiration rates of the palms, our plantation had only one third of the potential water recycling capacity of natural forests in the area. Converting natural forest into such plantations will thus result in significantly higher runoff rates.
View Full-Text
Keywords:
sap flux; transpiration; monocot; dicot; terra firme
▼
Show Figures
Figure 1
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited
MDPI and ACS Style
Kunert, N.; Aparecido, L.M.T.; Barros, P.; Higuchi, N. Modeling Potential Impacts of Planting Palms or Tree in Small Holder Fruit Plantations on Ecohydrological Processes in the Central Amazon. Forests 2015, 6, 2530-2544.
Show more citation formats
