Influence of climate, fire and phosphorus in the dynamics of vegetation in the Amazon-Cerrado border simulated with INLAND model

• Ano de defesa: 2015
• Autor(a) principal: Silva, Emily Ane Dionizio da
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Tipo de acesso: Acesso aberto
• Idioma: eng
• Instituição de defesa: Universidade Federal de Viçosa
• Palavras-chave em Português: Ecologia vegetal; Cerrado; Amazônia; Vegetação e clima; Vegetação - Efeito do fogo; Solos - Teor de fósforo; Plantas - Nutrição mineral; Agronomia
• Link de acesso: http://www.locus.ufv.br/handle/123456789/6659

Studies to assess the main factors responsible for the dynamics of vegetation in the Amazon such as climate and / or deforestation suggest the possibility of the Amazon rainforest may not resist a potencial change in rainfall patterns, and be converted to an ecosystem of more sparse vegetation like savanna, which gave rise to the term “Amazon Savannization”. Some of these initial studies, however, used only future climate scenarios, neglecting in their majority the fire effects and especially the effect of nutrient limitation on vegetation dynamics. Recently, in the context of climate modeling, advancements have been made in an attempt to build models that incorporate the nutritional restriction effect and the fire to assess and measure their effects on vegetation at a large scale. In this work, the main objective was to evaluate the isolated and combined effects of climate (inter annual variability and CO2), fire (F) and nutritional limitation by phosphorus (P) using the dynamic vegetation model INLAND in the transition between forest-Cerrado. The INLAND model is the first Brazilian model to simulate the vegetation dynamics incorporating these factors. The INLAND characterizes the vegetation through plant functional types, which combined differently give rise to biomes. The nutritional limitation is established through a linear function of the total phosphorus content in the soil and the maximum carboxylation capacity of Rubisco enzyme (Vmax). The Rubisco is the main enzyme responsible for regulating carboxylation rates in plants with the C3 photosynthetic mechanism type acting directly on net primary productivity (NPP) and the increase of biomass. Two regional the datasets of Vmax to be used as input data of the simulations, based on regional (PR) (field measurements) and global data (PG) of total P content in the soil. In the design of numerical experiment, 24 simulations were performed for different combinations of climate factors, P, F and CO2 were obtained. To validate the simulations, regional datasets of dry season leaf area index (LAI), and biomass were compared against simulated values by the INLAND model. The results showed that isolation, the effect of fire on the NPP in the Cerrado is positive and higher than the effects of nutritional restriction, contrary to what happens in the Amazon biome where the P acts to reduce the NPP. The CO2 when evaluated in combination with the effects of fire acted as an attenuator increasing the NPP in the transition region. With respect to the climate, the use of inter-annual variability improved representation of biomass and LAI simulated by INLAND. The LAI and biomass simulated values showed good correlation with Amazon-Cerrado observed gradient. The best representation of the vegetation composition by INLAND was found when the effects of PG+F+CO2 were combined.