INSERÇÃO DOS FRAGMENTOS DE CERRADO NA PAISAGEM DOS CAMPOS GERAIS DO PARANÁ

Abstract

Considered the second largest biome of Brazil, the savannah has its southern limit of occurrence in the Paraná State, in the Campos Gerais region like disjunct patches at six districts: Sengés, Jaguariaíva Piraí do Sul, Tibagi, Carambeí and Ponta Grossa. It is a vegetation relict of drier climates in Pleistocene controled mainly by the physiographic factors, like the relief of cuesta of the Devonian escarp. In this study, were located, georefered, mapped and physiognomicly characterized 59 remnants that compound the campo sujo com fácies de cerrado (3,9%) and cerrado rupestre (3,3%) in districts farther south, and cerrado stricto sensu (56,8%) and forest physiognomies like cerradão (32%) to the north. This work also raise new data related to the proximity of regional geological features, as Ponta Grossa Arch and Brasiliana Orogeny, and pedological and geological substrate in areas with deficit of water, beyond the substrate geological and pedological that guarantee shallow and poor soils. Were prepared a map of distribution and a letter-image for each fragment. The fragments occupy a area of 2.780,45 ha, corresponding at 0.24% of the region, which almost half of them are under conservation units. They vary from 0.9 to 400.45 ha.Most of them are close to areas of low commercial value, with limited agricultural mechanization, in a region deeply transformed by the expansion of agribusiness over the last decades. Evidence is thus a geologic structural control of the permanence of this vegetation, associated with anthropic control of the distribution of remnants, which have occupied larger areas than today.