Percepção de serviços ecossistêmicos por agricultores familiares na Amazônia Oriental: subsídios para a restauração florestal.

Abstract

The agroforest systems are commonly recommended to family farmers who seeks to recover degraded areas. The use of this agriculture production system is relevant not only because it offers a proved diversity in ecosystem services, but also because it already is a traditional alternative to itinerant agriculture. Due to the lack of studies about de sociocultural dimension of ecosystem services and the benefits of agroforest system areas, we seek to evaluate in this work the perception and comprehension of northeast Pará family farmers about these. Pursuing this target, we realize the categorization of forest recovery strategies from a primary data collection – interviews, semi structured questionnaire, illustrated questionnaire anf Likert Scale – within the Irituia (PA) residents. Through the relative perception based on the Likert scale application, we noticed that the agricultures recognize the benefits accruing from agroforest systems and natural landscapes. Not only, had the studied group demonstrated high perception of ecosystem services in all proposed categories in the Millennium ecosystem evaluation. Furthermore, the group of agricultures with a smaller area of forest reserve and bigger area of agroforest systems is related to higher perceptions about the ecosystem services. The result suggest that a lost in forest area, in the individual level, probably drives to a higher sense about the benefits of natural systems and then, for those, the increment in agroforest system areas constitutes an attempt to return to functions and benefits lost through environmental degradation over time. The biggest motivations to forest recovery through agroforest systems, named by the farmers, were food security and commodities trade. Was also possible to identify that the agricultures of northeast Pará have an understanding that agroforest systems use contributes to recover degraded areas. Otherwise, the high perception about ecosystem services did not reflect in the plants diversity. In general, we can say that support programs are necessary to strengthen the agroforest systems capacity of provide ecosystem services and increase the biodiversity conservation.