A Multicriteria Evaluation of Sustainable Riparian Revegetation with Local Fruit Trees around a Reservoir of a Hydroelectric Power Plant in Central Brazil

Abstract

The construction of hydropower plants often requires the flooding of large land areas, causing considerable alterations in the natural environment. In the region surrounding the reservoir of the Corumbá IV hydroelectric plant, located in the Cerrado region of Central Brazil, two types of soil predominate, classified as Dystroferric Red Latosol and Dystroferric Haplic Cambisol. The plant owners have to restore the degraded biome after the flooding of the margins caused by the filling of the reservoir. An experiment was carried out with fifteen native species, selected for having ideal phytosociological properties. Nine of them showed a survivability considered satisfactory in a planting situation, with a view to large-scale planting. Assuming that the planting of native fruit trees can be a quick solution to the attraction and preservation of wildlife, it would therefore provide sustainable riparian revegetation around the reservoir. We adopted the SIMOS technique to rank the criteria based on four morphological features and a Fuzzy AHP model to rank the contributions of the nine fruit tree species to the sustainable restoration of part of the riparian vegetation cover around the reservoir. In practical terms, we concluded that the soil types did not have any influence on tree survival after two years of growth, but the native trees’ morphological features varied among the species. These findings simplify the large-scale planting of seedlings that must be carried out by the operator in the riparian forest around the reservoir.