Influence of land use on soil functioning and sustainability of agro-extractive systems in eastern Amazonia

Abstract

Familiar agriculture has been identified as major modifier of Amazon vegetation. These small establishments have presented several problems of land use, availability and quality of water resources and crop production. Towards this problem, the aim of this project is understand soil degradation processes through morphologic, chemical and physical-hydric characterization of two topossequences under native vegetation and pastures in a familiar agriculture area. From these data, scenarios of diverse production systems will be created and adapted to conditions of relief and soil functioning to allow recovery of ancient landscapes of projects of settlements on southeast Pará, for sustainable production systems ensuring the maintenance of local farmers on these lands. Data of physic-hydric, micromorphological, mineralogical and chemical variables will be interpreted from descriptive and multivariate statistical analysis. These data will be subjected to analysis of variance and means will be compared by Tukey test at 5% of significance with statistical program R Development (2009), to evaluate how these variables behave in relation to environmental sources of variation (climate, drainage, particle size, nutrients, density, among others). (AU)