Abstract
The commercial nurseries of macaúba palm (Acrocomia aculeata) have experienced excessive seedling mortality, which is possibly due to the lack of information about the proper growing practices. The goal of this study was to investigate the response of macaúba seedlings to water stress using different irrigation frequencies during the early seedling stage. The experiment was carried out in a macaúba palm nursery located in João Pinheiro, Minas Gerais, Brazil. The treatments started 30 days after sowing. At 90 days after sowing, the morphological (number of leaves, stem diameter, shoot length, root weight and the fresh and dry matter content of leaves, stem and roots), physiological (allocation of photosynthates) and chemical (nutrient content in the shoot) characteristics were evaluated. The results indicated that shoot height and stem diameter became smaller as the frequency of irrigation was reduced. However, the accumulation of fresh biomass in leaves and stems, and the leaf and root dry biomass became higher under the same condition. When water stress was induced in younger seedlings, the allocation of photosynthates occured more proportionally across all organs of the plants. The highest accumulation of K, S and Fe in the shoot were observed in plants that were exposed to water stress. N accumulation was higher in the aerial part of the seedlings as the irrigation frequency increased. However, the opposite behavior was observed for P, which accumulation was lowest in the control treatments.
Highlights
Values of 27.80, 21.53, 19.58 cm were recorded for T0, treatment 1 (T1) and treatment 2 (T2), respectively, representing a reduction of 27% and 30% relative to the control treatment, (Figure 6A)
Treatment T1 resulted in a mean of 4.04 mm and T2 in a mean of 3.73 mm, both smaller than the stem diameter recorded for the control treatment which resulted in a value of 5.46 mm, representing a decrease of 26% and 32%, respectively
Macaúba seedlings grown under water stress showed specific changes in morphological characteristics: reduced aerial parts, stem thickness, and fresh and dry biomass of the leaves
Summary
The species grow in the savannas and open forests of tropical America, which are distributed from Central America to southern South America It is probably found naturally in almost all the Brazilian territory, especially across the Southeast and Central West regions (Pimentel et al, 2015; dos Reis, Pinto, da Assunção, & da Silva, 2017). This species has an annual flowering season in Brazil from September through February and with peak flowering from November through December (Berton, 2013), which coincides with the season of highest rainfall in the areas in which it grows (Colombo, Berton, Diaz, & Ferrari, 2017). Fruiting occurs throughout the year after the fourth year in the field and generally the fruits are ripe 12 to 13 months after fertilization (Giraldo Montoya, Motoike, Kuki, De Oliveira, & Gomes Honorio, 2015)
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