Abstract
Wounding of trees by debarking has been reported to form a callus tissue. This work aims to investigate macroscopic and microscopic modifications of wood after the removal of barks in Alstonia boonei, Scorodophloeus zenkeri, and Garcinia lucida. Species that are not yet barking were wounded to conducting experimental debarking. The wound was rectangular with 30 cm vertically with a lateral extent of 10 cm. Every three months, there was a follow-up for fifteen months during which the macroscopic and microscopic phenomena were observed and recorded. Microsections of 15–20 μm thickness were taken on a piece of wood from the regenerated and intact wood, with a sledge microtome. Staining of cell walls was done with safranin and fast green to increase contrast in an anatomical slide. Analyzes of the variability of xylem anatomical features were done by semi-automatic measurements using the SpectrumSee digital image analysis software. The speed of recovery of the bark of these three species is 9.04 cm/year for A. boonei, 5.9 cm/year for S. zenkeri, and 3.85 cm/year for G. lucida. The recovery of A. boonei’s bark is the fastest, and it just takes 15 months to heal its wound. Densities of vessels were 8, 38, and 17 per mm², respectively, for the wood of A. boonei, S. zenkeri, and G. lucida before barking. These values increased for A. boonei (26) and G. lucida (20) except for S. zenkeri (25). In all species, the diameter of the vessels has decreased in the regenerated wood. Management practices that enhance the monitoring of sustainable harvesting levels of species and promote alternative plants for the same uses should be considered as part of conservation strategies.
Highlights
Forests provide many ecosystem services that are not currently valued in economic terms, and their loss can have significant negative impacts on health and livelihoods, especially among the rural poor for whom forests are often important safety net (Wunder, 2001)
Non-timber forest products (NTFP) from tropical forests have become a subject of mounting international concern as a result of several factors which affect the availability of many tropical species
We found that during the early wound healing, all species produced vessels with smaller area than in unaffected wood and this significantly decreased the specific conductive area in the investigated species (P≤ 0.05).The opposite trend was observed for parenchyma areas which increase significantly in wound wood
Summary
Forests provide many ecosystem services that are not currently valued in economic terms, and their loss can have significant negative impacts on health and livelihoods, especially among the rural poor for whom forests are often important safety net (Wunder, 2001). 40 % of the rural populations live in situations of extreme poverty and these 250 million people live in the forestry zones of or savanna (FAO, 2018). These counteracting forces make it difficult to generalize about the impacts of deforestation and forest degradation on people living in forest landscapes (Turner et al, 2012).The Cameroonian forest, covers an area of about 22,523,732 hectares, which represents about 48% of the national territory (de Wasseige et al, 2009). Continuing deforestation in the tropics threatens to eliminate hundreds, if not thousands, of species during the few decades (Hall & Bawa, 1993).With a growing appreciation of the importance of NTFPs and their potential role in the socio-economic well-being of especially rural communities (Ticktin et al, 2006), the harvesting of NTFPs is recognised as an important aspect of the sustainable management of natural forests (Mahapatra & Mitchell, 1997)
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