Efeitos das mudanças no uso da terra sobre os atributos funcionais de plantas em florestas neotropicais.

Abstract

The different changes in land use and cover have promoted significant losses of biodiversity and ecosystem services, especially in tropical forests. The conversion of native forests for agricultural purposes, mining, logging, among other uses, has compromised the functioning of tropical forests and altered the ecological strategies of plants. Studying the functional traits of plants helps to understand how they are able to acquire, invest and use their resources under the new environmental conditions. The development of this work, based on a literature review, seeks to answer the following question: how changes in land use and land cover affect the functional traits of plants in Neotropical humid forests? To answer this question, we carried out an evaluation of 122 articles through a scientometric and meta-analysis approach of plant functional traits that were sampled in environments with different types of land use and land cover. Most studies were carried out in Brazil and there was a growing interest in the topic from 2015 onwards. The main types of land use found were pasture and agriculture, and the attributes more commonly evaluated were specific leaf area, leaf area and wood density. Individually, most studies (~65%) observed significant differences between attributes in conserved and disturbed areas. However, the results we show indicate how promising it is to evaluate functional traits in this context of land use changes, in which one can understand from the response of individual plants to scaling up to the functioning of tropical forests in the Neotropical region