Summary
The Brazilian Amazon has the world’s largest concentration of indigenous American peoples, but many environmental threats have affected the preservation of this enormous human ethnocultural heritage. This study identified the species and studied the different uses of wood by two indigenous ethnic groups in Southeastern Pará, Brazil, namely the “Gavião” and “Suruí”. Ten taxa were identified, distributed in eight botanical families, with five being identified to genus and five to species levels. The wood of Bertholletia excelsa, an endangered forest species in Brazil, is important in the material culture of the Suruí indigenous people. The indigenous ethnic groups studied preferentially use medium density wood for building and high-density wood for hunting and warfare artefacts. The technological properties of wood justify its use by the indigenous peoples studied. We caution that the increasing environmental threats in Indigenous Lands within the Brazilian Amazon harm the preservation of the ethnocultural heritage of indigenous peoples.
Protected areas in the Brazilian Amazon suffer from conflicting activities, such as the production of charcoal from illegal logging. Charcoal anatomy is an important tool that can be useful for forensic charcoal identification and to help the conservation of these areas. To assist in combating deforestation in protected areas, this study describes the charcoal anatomy of 14 tree species that occur in the Tapirapé–Aquiri National Forest, Pará, Brazil, and provides macrographs of transverse surfaces and scanning electron microscope (SEM) images to aid government agencies during surveillance. We adopted a carbonisation method that simulated real conditions. Anatomical features were well preserved in the charcoal. The axial parenchyma and vessel frequency are easily observed in both macrographs and SEM images, so they are important diagnostic features for initial screening of families and for checking the load according to the ‘document of forestry origin’ (DOF) by the surveillance agents. Uncommon and highly diagnostic features for distinguishing genera or even species, such as rays exclusively uniseriate, sheath cells, tile cells and storied structure, were observed only in SEM images. Our findings are suitable to provide a database on charcoal anatomy of native tree species of the Amazon, with practical application in government inspection activities in protected areas in Brazil and other countries with similar issues.
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