Abstract
Diverse agroforestry systems conciliate food production, biodiversity conservation, and the provision of ecosystem services as atmospheric carbon sequestration. However, the role of floristic richness in the production of biomass in these systems is not clear. This study evaluated the effect of species richness and vegetation structure on aboveground biomass carbon in different agroforestry systems in the Southern Amazon of Bolivia. For that, 25 agroforestry systems and 4 secondary forests were studied in the departments of Santa Cruz and Beni. In each system, a 1 963 m2 circular plot was installed, where the vegetation (trees, shrubs and herbaceous) and necromass (leaf litter, branches and dead trees) were sampled. Linear and logarithmic functions were used to evaluate the effect of vegetation richness and structure on carbon, and the variance partition was used to examine the pure and shared effect of the richness and vegetation structure variables on carbon. Regressions showed a positive strong relationship between species richness and carbon (r2 = 0.74; P < 0.001). The partition of carbon variance showed that richness, structure and variation of the structure explained 85.7 %. Alone the richness explained 12.7 %, the structure 8.8 % and the variation of the structure 4.8 %. These results confirm that carbon in the aboveground biomass increases with species richness and structural variation of the vegetation. Therefore, more biodiverse and stratified agroforestry systems are more efficient in the use of resources and can contribute with climate change mitigation.
Highlights
La diversidad de especies en los bosques tropicales es fundamental para su funcionamiento, resiliencia y capacidad de proporcionar bienes y servicios (Cardinale et al, 2011, 2012; Hooper et al, 2012; Gamfeldt et al, 2013)
El objetivo de este estudio fue evaluar el efecto de la riqueza de especies y la estructura de la vegetación sobre el almacenamiento de carbono en la biomasa en diferentes sistemas agroforestales en la Amazonía Boliviana
Explanatory variables: richness, structure and age, agroforestry systems sampled in the Southern Amazon, Bolivia
Summary
Área de estudio: El estudio se realizó en la Amazonía sur de Bolivia, en ocho municipios, en los departamentos de Beni (San Ignacio de Moxos, San Andrés y San Javier) y Santa Cruz (Yapacaní, San Carlos, Buena Vista, Ascensión de Guarayos y Urubichá) (Fig. 1). Los resultados de esta investigación concuerdan con la idea de que la estratificación de la vegetación puede regular la diversidad de especies (Reich et al, 2012; Zhang, Chen, & Reich, 2012; Zhang & Chen, 2015), permitiendo una utilización más eficiente de los recursos luz, agua y nutrientes (Poorter et al, 2015; Ali, Yan, Chang, Cheng, & Liu, 2017), mejorando la producción de biomasa aérea debido al efecto de complementariedad de nichos (Loreau, 2000; Dıaz & Cabido, 2001; Coome, Kunstler, Canham, & Wright, 2009; Brassard et al, 2013). La partición de la varianza (Fig. 5) sugiere que la riqueza, la estructura y variación de la estructura (altura y Dap) de las especies arbóreas son los principales mecanismos para causar efectos positivos sobre el carbono en la biomasa en los sistemas agroforestales. APPENDIX 1 Location of agroforestry systems sampled in the Southern Amazon, Bolivia
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