Ecological Adaptation of Wild Peach Palm, Its In Situ Conservation and Deforestation-Mediated Extinction in Southern Brazilian Amazonia

Abstract

BackgroundThe Arc of Fire across southern Amazonia seasonally attracts worldwide attention as forests are cut and burned for agricultural expansion. These forests contain numerous wild relatives of native South American crops, such as peach palm.Methodology/Principal FindingsOur prospecting expeditions examined critical areas for wild peach palm in the Arc of Fire in Mato Grosso, Pará, Maranhão and Tocantins, as well as areas not previously examined in Amazonas and Amapá states. Recent digitization of the RADAM Brasil project permitted comparison among RADAM's parataxonomists' observations, previous botanical collections and our prospecting. Mapping on soils and vegetation types enabled us to hypothesize a set of ecological preferences. Wild peach palm is best adapted to Ultisols (Acrisols) in open forests across the Arc of Fire and westward into the more humid western Amazonia. Populations are generally small (fewer than 10 plants) on slopes above watercourses. In northern Mato Grosso and southern Pará soybean fields and pastures now occupy numerous areas where RADAM identified wild peach palm. The controversial BR-163 Highway is already eroding wild peach palm as deforestation expands.Conclusions/SignificanceMany of these populations are now isolated by increasing forest fragmentation, which will lead to decreased reproduction via inbreeding depression and eventual extinction even without complete deforestation. Federal conservation areas are less numerous in the Arc of Fire than in other parts of Brazilian Amazonia, although there are indigenous lands; these conservation areas contain viable populations of wild peach palm and require better protection than they are currently receiving. Ex situ conservation of these populations is not viable given the relative lack of importance of domesticated peach palm and the difficulty of maintaining even economically interesting genetic resources.

Origin and Domestication of Native Amazonian Crops

“…Within var. chichagui three types were proposed, with little description of their fruits and without detailing their distributions, which was done later by others [56] (Figure 1). Nonetheless, this revision now permits phylogenetic hypotheses that can be tested with genetic tools.…”

Peach palm (Bactris gasipaes) in tropical Latin America: implications for biodiversity conservation, natural resource management and human nutrition

“…In general, landraces from the western group have harder stems, more abundant and stronger spines, larger leaves and more solid rooting in their juvenile phase (Mora-Urpí et al 1997). The wild form can be further subdivided into three types based on taxonomical differences: type I of the southern Amazon; type II of northeast Colombia and northwest Venezuela; and type III of the Tropical Andes, southwest Amazon and Central America (Henderson 2000;Clement et al 2009).…”

“…Pollination is carried out mainly by insects, particularly small curculionid beetles over distances between 100 and 500 m; wind and gravity can also function as pollen vectors (Mora-Urpí et al 1997;Clement et al 2009). Since peach palm is a long-lived perennial and a predominantly outcrossing species, one can expect its populations and landraces to contain high levels of genetic diversity (Hamrick and Godt 1996;Mora-Urpí et al 1997).…”

“…They often occur in isolation or at low densities (Mora-Urpí et al 1997;Da Silva and Clement 2005). Though no definitive studies have been conducted on seed dispersal of peach palm, it is probably restricted locally to dispersal by birds and seed-gathering mammals, though seed may occasionally be dispersed by water, potentially over greater distances (Mora-Urpí et al 1997;Clement et al 2009). Gene flow of outcrossing tree species with this type of scattered distribution may be restricted and could result in genetically distinct isolated subpopulations with small effective population sizes (Mora-Urpí et al 1997).…”

Socialidade e diversidade de pequis (Caryocar brasiliense, Caryocaraceae) entre os Kuikuro do alto rio Xingu (Brasil)

“…Desde os anos 1990, a conservação da agrobiodiversidade tem recebido atenção crescente, em função de seu papel na alimentação mundial (Wood e Lenné, 1997) 2 , sendo particularmente relevantes os estudos sobre conservação em seu próprio contexto ecológico e sociocultural, a chamada conservação on-farm (Bellon et al, 1997;Elias et al 2001;Clement et al, 2009a). Contudo, esta literatura ainda está predominantemente centrada nas bases genéticas e agronômicas da agrobiodiversidade, sem dedicar igual atenção aos processos socioculturais responsáveis por sua origem e manutenção (Emperaire, 2006;Rival, 2007;Rival e Mckey, 2008).…”