Composição, diversidade e estrutura da vegetação lenhosa em fitofisionomias savânicas do cerrado e seus reflexos no estoque de carbono na Serra do Cipó, Minas Gerais, Brasil

Abstract

There is an imminent need of restoration and preservation of biodiversity and the potential for sequestration of atmospheric carbon dioxide by vegetation of the Cerrado biome. Details on the phytophysiognomic data, however, has great importance for the application of scientific knowledge, since the Biome displays great diversity in their vegetation types. We seek in this study to review the researches on carbon stocks for the Cerrado Biome, as well as refine the information in phytophysiognomic level to the floristic structure, diversity, horizontal and vertical structure and carbon storage in woody vegetation of the State of Minas Gerais. For that: [1] we described, floristic and physiognomically, Dense Cerrado and Cerrado on Rocky Solis áreas located at Parque Nacional da Serra do Cipó, and sought to the role of environmental factors and spatial proximity in this scenario; [2] we reviewed the studies on carbon storage in different physiognomies of the Cerrado Biome, addressing the methodologies used, and we infer about its applicability to global warming mitigation and conservation of the biome; and [3] we estimate the carbon stock in the two sampled vegetation types and discuss the effectiveness of different mathematical equations available in the literature for this kind of investigation. We found that the two forest types differ in the floristic structure, diversity and phytosociological structure, but have similar roles in the global carbon balance. Therefore, both of them deserve equal attention for biodiversity conservation, and for the balance of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. There is a lack of data on carbon storage in biome beyond an urgent need for methodological improvement and research of different vegetation types and strata and different growth forms Biome.