Influência das áreas de ocupação humana na diversidade de mamíferos terrestres na perda florestal em floresta de terra firme na Amazônia central

Abstract

The growth of anthropized areas is causing a great loss of forests and diversity on a global scale. In tropical forests, as well as in the Amazon, this growth is mainly due to the advance of agriculture. In Brazil, since the 1960s, the government has encouraged colonization and agriculture in the Amazon, generally in a disordered way. Thus, the settlements, which we define in this thesis as areas of human occupation, were initially created as a form of occupation through agrarian reform to promote their occupation. One of these categories of settlements, called Settlement Projects (SP), shows a large conversion of forests to other land uses in the Amazon. As a way of conserving forests and their diversity, the Native Vegetation Protection Law or also known as the New Forest Code (NFC) was created, which aims, among other things, to create Legal Reserves (LR) to preserve 80% of the settlement lots as forests and thus conserve their biodiversity. In this thesis we investigate the influence of areas of human occupation (SP) on the diversity of mid to large-bodied terrestrial mammals and on the loss of forests in central Amazonia. For this, in Chapter 1, we compare forest loss before and after NFC implementation to assess its effectiveness. We compared two types of Protected Areas (Indigenous Lands and Conservation Units) as a control group with the SP in the State of Amazonas. We show that in the SP, even with the increase in forest loss, they remained constant within the threshold allowed by the NFC after the implementation of the law, and, that the Protected Areas maintain their forest conservation function. In chapter 2, we evaluated the influence on the taxonomic composition of terrestrial mammals and the filtering of functional traits of this group by anthropogenic variables along terra firme forests in the LR of the SP, and, in continuous forests, close to Manaus city, central Amazon. We show that mammals have a similar number of species between LR and continuous forests, with some functional characteristics and the anthropogenic variable Forest Cover affecting species distribution. In Chapter 3, we compare the difference in mammal diversity between floor and canopy strata and evaluate the use of camera traps in these strata in a terra firme forest in central Amazonia. We show that the floor has greater diversity, with species of different sizes and more trophic guilds, and that the canopy has mostly small mammals and frugivores that help in seed dispersal. We show that the technique of using camera traps is effective, non-invasive, less exhausting and with better cost benefit when compared to other methods.