Wood volume is overestimated in the Brazilian Amazon: Why not use generic volume prediction methods in tropical forest management?

Autor: Cardoso RM; Faculdade de Tecnologia, Departamento de Engenharia Florestal, Universidade de Brasília, Campus Darcy Ribeiro Asa Norte, Brasília, DF, 70910-900, Brazil., Miguel EP; Faculdade de Tecnologia, Departamento de Engenharia Florestal, Universidade de Brasília, Campus Darcy Ribeiro Asa Norte, Brasília, DF, 70910-900, Brazil., de Souza HJ; Faculdade de Tecnologia, Departamento de Engenharia Florestal, Universidade de Brasília, Campus Darcy Ribeiro Asa Norte, Brasília, DF, 70910-900, Brazil. Electronic address: hallefyj.souza@gmail.com., de Souza ÁN; Faculdade de Tecnologia, Departamento de Engenharia Florestal, Universidade de Brasília, Campus Darcy Ribeiro Asa Norte, Brasília, DF, 70910-900, Brazil., Nascimento RGM; Instituto de Ciências Agrárias, Universidade Federal Rural da Amazônia, Belém, Laboratório de Mensuração e Manejo do Recurso Florestal (LabFor), Av. Presidente Tancredo Neves, No. 2501, Belém, PA, 66077-830, Brazil.
Jazyk: angličtina
Zdroj: Journal of environmental management [J Environ Manage] 2024 Jan 15; Vol. 350, pp. 119593. Date of Electronic Publication: 2023 Nov 27.
DOI: 10.1016/j.jenvman.2023.119593
Abstrakt: The Amazon has a range of species with high potential for sustainable timber harvesting, but for them to be utilized globally, the merchantable wood volume must be accurately quantified. However, since the 1950s, inadequate methods for estimating merchantable timber volumes have been employed in the Amazon, and Brazilian Government agencies still require some of them. The natural variability of the Amazon Forest provides an abundance of species of different sizes and shapes, conferring several peculiarities, which makes it necessary to use up-to-date and precise methods for timber quantification in Amazon Forest management. Given the employment of insufficient estimation methods for wood volume, this study scrutinizes the disparities between the actual harvested merchantable wood volume and the volume estimated by the forest inventory during the harvesting phase across five distinct public forest areas operating under sustainable forest management concessions. We used mixed-effect models to evaluate the relationships between inventory and harvested volume for genera and forest regions. We performed an equivalence test to assess the similarity between the volumes obtained during the pre-and post-harvest phases. We calculated root mean square error and percentage bias for merchantable volume as accuracy metrics. There was a strong tendency for the 100% forest inventory to overestimate merchantable wood volume, regardless of genus and managed area. There was a significant discrepancy between the volumes inventoried and harvested in different regions intended for sustainable forest management, in which only 22% of the groups evaluated were equivalent. The methods currently practiced by forest companies for determining pre-harvest merchantable volume are inaccurate enough to support sustainable forest management in the Amazon. They may even facilitate the region's illegal timber extraction and organized crime.
Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
(Copyright © 2023 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)
Databáze: MEDLINE
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