Estudo da relação entre os tamanhos populacionais das espécies arbóreas na Amazônia e seus usos pelos humanos

Abstract

For more than 13,000 years, Amazonia’s inhabitants have been using forest plants. Hypotheses about the association between plant abundance and their use suggest either that plant availability influences uses or that use influences abundance of useful plants in modern forests via long-term human activities. The relationship between usefulness of arboreal species and their population sizes in Amazonian forests at the continental-scale is, however, unknown. Here we show that Amazonian forests are dominated by useful arboreal species, which include at least 2326 species. Our model predicts that hyperdominant species have at least 80 % chance to be useful, whereas non-hyperdominants have only 9 % chance of being useful. Incipiently domesticated species are the most abundant in Amazonian forests, whereas domesticated species are less abundant. Our analyses elucidate the enormous usefulness of Amazonian forests, although this usefulness seems invisible today, which may explain why the forests have been destroyed to supply cattle and grain to world markets.