Local representations of change and conservation of the riparian forests along the São Francisco River (Northeast Brazil)
Introduction
Changes to natural environments are occurring in different parts of the world. For example, Santiago et al. (2002) report that natural landscapes in Brazil are undergoing rapid change due to increasing urban development, which particularly affects native vegetation. Similarly, the riparian vegetation in the São Francisco River Basin in the Caatinga, a savanna-like domain in Brazil, has been undergoing constant change due to inappropriate land use, pollution from pesticides, desertification caused by the removal of native vegetation for agricultural development and disorganized exploitation of various timber and non-timber products without reforestation (Campello et al., 1999).
Local people develop close links with riparian natural resources. By using these resources and managing the ecosystem, they understand and are directly involved in the process of landscape change (Bell, 2001). To understand the processes of degradation and thus recover the vegetation of these areas, it is believed that local people must become integral participants in ecosystem restoration. Importantly, this participation will be beneficial to the environment if these people understand environmental problems and are willing to contribute to their solutions. Therefore, the first step toward the process of increasing local knowledge and promoting environmental citizenship is to investigate the perceptions of local people and access their “vision” of the surrounding environment (Fernandes et al., 2006). Previous works, such as by Lykke (2000) and Xu et al. (2006), have shown that by accessing local representations of the native vegetation, it is possible to identify changes in the landscape. Local people may be able to indicate which species have declined over the years, and this information may be used to support future reforestation projects. Moreover, as illustrated by Tabuti (2007), in addition to reporting which species have declined, people can identify the causes associated with these declines and landscape modification and reflect on their own attitudes toward the environment. Therefore, this study aims to generate information that will contribute to the recovery of degraded riparian vegetation on the banks the São Francisco River, which is important for agricultural irrigation and the survival of local populations. This work is part of a project by a Brazilian agricultural research company to recover riparian forests. This company intends to undertake reforestation focused on the species most used by the local people, and it also seeks to involve participants in this study through environmental education.
This study addresses the following questions: How does the local population represent changes to riparian vegetation over time? What historical events were responsible for these changes? How does the local population represent issues related to the use and conservation of riparian vegetation?
In this work, the term “representation” will be used to replace the term “perception” because “perception” only refers to what is perceived through the senses (Gumuchian and Marois, 2000). Moreover, Cavalcante and Maciel (2008) argue that there is a difference between what is perceived and what can be expressed.
Section snippets
Study area
This work was conducted in 2009 in the 117,351 km2 valley region of the São Francisco River (Fig. 1), which covers the states of Bahia (BA), Pernambuco (PE), Alagoas (AL) and Sergipe (SE) in Northeast Brazil. This region has a population of approximately 2.48 million inhabitants (IBGE, 2008). The São Francisco River Basin is the most highly populated, semi-arid region in the world. Some of the micro-regions of the São Francisco River basin cover municipalities that are mostly occupied by small
Ouro Verde community
Sixty-three percent of the 54 respondents in this community reported that changes in the riparian vegetation had occurred in the region while 37% said that the vegetation had not changed. There was a significant difference between the number of people who said there were changes and those who said there were no changes (p = 0.093, χ2 = 0.0124). In addition, there were no significant differences between younger and older respondents concerning changes in the vegetation (p = 0.696; G-test = 0544).
Representations of local changes in riparian vegetation
The representations of residents from the three communities indicated that there were changes in the riparian vegetation of the region. However, there was no clear agreement as to whether changes were considered for the better or for the worse, especially among Grapiúna and Ouro Verde respondents. This suggests that because these two communities are rural settlements prohibited from using native vegetation, respondents may have felt inhibited from indicating that there was a change for the
Final considerations
This study showed that, according to informants' perceptions, the riparian vegetation has been modified. However, some informants perceived that the vegetation has changed for the better while others indicated that these changes were for the worse, but linked to this perception of the positive aspects of landscape change was an increase in the abundance of exotic species cultivated for agricultural purposes. This demonstrates that native species may have been replaced over time by exotic
Acknowledgments
The authors thank the residents of the communities who participated in the study. We also thank Semi-Arid Embrapa and its project, “Diagnosis of degraded areas and pilot plan for the restoration of the São Francisco riverbank in the Caatinga Biome”, for financial and logistical support, and we thank the trainees Mara Poline and Ùldérico Rios for their assistance with data collection. We thank CNPq for the scholarship granted to the first author and for the financial support and research
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