Land-use change in the Atlantic rainforest region: Consequences for the hydrology of small catchments

Autor(es)

Salemi, Luiz Felippe ^[1] ; Groppo, Juliano Daniel ^[1] ; Trevisan, Rodrigo ^[1] ; de Moraes, Jorge Marcos ^{[2, 1]} ; de Barros Ferraz, Silvio Frosini ^[3] ; Villani, Joao Paulo ; Duarte-Neto, Paulo Jose ^[4] ; Martinelli, Luiz Antonio ^[1]

Afiliação do(s) autor(es)

^[1] Univ Sao Paulo, Ctr Energia Nucl Agr, Lab Ecol Isotop, Piracicaba, SP - Brazil

^[2] Escola Engn Piracicaba, Piracicaba, SP - Brazil

^[3] Univ Sao Paulo, Escola Super Agr Luiz de Queiroz, Lab Hidrol Florestal, Piracicaba, SP - Brazil

^[4] Univ Fed Rural Pernambuco, Dept Estat & Informat, Recife, PE - Brazil

• Tipo de documento: Artigo Científico
• Fonte: Journal of Hydrology; v. 499, p. 100-109, AUG 30 2013.
• Citações Web of Science: 31

Resumo

The Atlantic forest of Brazil is one of the most endangered ecosystems in the world. Despite approximately 500 years of intense land-use change in this biome, the influence of land-use changes on hydrological processes have yet to be investigated in-depth. To bridge this gap, we studied various features of three small catchments covered by pristine original montane cloud forest, pasture, and eucalyptus for 2 years (January 2008-December 2009), including the hydraulic properties of soils, throughfall, overland flow and streamflow processes. The forest saturated hydraulic conductivity (K-sat) was higher near the soil surface (0.15 m depth) compared to eucalyptus and pasture. As a consequence, higher overland flow generation in terms of volume was observed in pasture and eucalyptus. Despite this increase in overland flow generation, overland flow coefficients (overland flow: precipitation ratio) were substantially low throughout the study period with slightly higher values in 2009. These low overland flow coefficients were attributed to the large predominance of low rainfall intensities (<10 mm h(-1)) as well as high K-sat spatial variability. These overland flow results and the absence of perched water table showed that catchments seem still to be dominated by vertical flowpaths irrespective of land-use. In this sense, the annual streamflow is still dominated by baseflow in all of the catchments. Therefore, despite reductions regarding interception and saturated hydraulic conductivity when converting forest to eucalyptus and pasture, the prevailing rainfall intensities do not cause runoff generation processes to be substantially different among land-uses. Forest and eucalyptus convert a similar proportion of annual precipitation to annual streamflow, with the more likely factors for these results being the high interception under forest and high transpiration under eucalyptus. Finally, cloud forest conversion to pasture does not promote significant monthly streamflow change. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. (AU)

• Processo FAPESP: 06/59536-3 - Estudo do balanço hídrico e balanço biogeoquímico de nitrogênio em uma microbacia com plantação florestal de eucalipto no litoral norte do Estado de São Paulo
• Beneficiário: Rodrigo Trevisan
• Modalidade de apoio: Bolsas no Brasil - Mestrado
• Processo FAPESP: 06/54292-9 - Estudo do balanço hídrico e balanço biogeoquímico de nitrogênio em uma microbacia de primeira ordem com cobertura de pastagem no litoral norte do Estado de São Paulo
• Beneficiário: Luiz Felippe Salemi
• Modalidade de apoio: Bolsas no Brasil - Mestrado
• Processo FAPESP: 06/55136-0 - Processos hidrológicos e transporte de nitrogênio em bacias com cobertura de floresta e pasto no litoral norte do Estado de São Paulo
• Beneficiário: Jorge Marcos de Moraes
• Modalidade de apoio: Auxílio à Pesquisa - Regular
• Processo FAPESP: 06/51488-0 - Caracterizacao hidrologica e dinamica do nitrogenio na microbacia do ribeirao do ipiranga, do parque estadual da serra do mar, nucleo santa virginia.
• Beneficiário: Juliano Daniel Groppo
• Modalidade de apoio: Bolsas no Brasil - Doutorado