Abstract
ABSTRACT Sustainable forest management promotes financial revenues while keeping the forest cover and environmental services. Nevertheless, the logging operation causes changes in the forest and canopy horizontal and vertical structure. Our objective is to evaluate the changes in the forest canopy and its consequences to the forest management, following logging in a secondary Atlantic Rainforest. We used hemispherical photography to determine the Canopy Openness (CO), Leaf Area Index (LAI) and the radiation absorption (fAPAR) in nine experimental plots before and after logging. We did not find a clear correlation between the forest horizontal structure and the canopy architecture. Despite this, there was an increase in CO and decrease in LAI and fAPAR after logging. The variation in CO and fAPAR were affected by logging intensity, but LAI did not show the same pattern. We suggest a conservative maximum logging intensity of 30% of the basal area and tree density.
Highlights
Tropical forests are key components of the biosphere
The average Leaf Area Index (LAI) reduction, from 5.3 to 4.5, was not significant at the tested level in a first analysis (W = 37; n = 9; p = 0.09), the difference becomes significant when we exclude an outlier value from the analysis (W = 32; n = 8; p = 0.05, Figure 3b). This outlier value was derived in part from the presence of understory individuals just above the camera lens in some of the photographs in the experimental plots (EP), which caused an unrealistic increase in LAI
Canopy Openness (CO) had a standard deviation of 1.8% before logging and 5.8% after the operation, and fraction of photosynthetically active absorbed radiation (fAPAR) had 0.016 and 0.051, respectively
Summary
Tropical forests are key components of the biosphere. They accommodate more than half of the forest carbon of the planet, of which 42% is stored in live biomass. Most of Santa Catarina’s native vegetation is composed of small fragments of secondary forests with less than 50 ha, representing about 40% of the original forest cover of the state (Vibrans et al, 2013). They are under big pressure to convert to other land uses, in part, because of the low value attributed to native forests (Siminski & Fantini, 2010). They have a very high ecosystem value in relation to other land uses, such as agriculture and reforestation (Edwards et al, 2014)
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