Representações locais sobre a mata ciliar às margens do Rio São Francisco – Nordeste do Brasil

Abstract

Riparian forest are placed along rivers and streams and they play a fundamental role along these watercourse since they protect the riverbeds against aggradation provoked by margin erosion. Resource use in areas around these rivers accompanies the histories of civilizations since along time, in most case without a planning. In this context the river São Francisco located in the states of Bahia, Pernambuco and Sergipe in Northeastern Brazil has suffered a strong pressure along its whole course. Therein, by means of the investigation of local landscape representations by people living next to the river, this study seeks to generate information that will a wok of landscape restoration wich will be performed by Embrapa (Empresa brasileira de pesquisa agropecuária) section semiarid. To verify peoples’s representations about local landscape change semi-estrutured interviews were perfomed with three communities in the municipalities of Bahia and Pernambuco. To verify people’s representations about landscape about landscape chances and plant resource abundance in common areas two types of participative methodologies were additionally performed: the first was the construction of a historical graph to acess representations about local landscape chances. The second was the construction of a timeline and the participants were questioned about landscape change in time, when these changes occurred and what changes and their causes. Aiming to record local representations about diversity and abundance of useful species considered more important by the users, the free-listing technique was used, wich aim to register specific information about a cultural dominium of the studied area. The results indicate that in a general way there were changes in riparian vegetation being the type of agricultural system practiced in the region among the main causes of these changes. However there were no significant differences between the informants that said that the changes were good and those who said that the changes were bad. Furthermore the informants said that there was a increase in the abundance of exotic species. The interviewed also represented their worry about vegetation conservation, mainly because of the river protection and they indicate some possible solutions for its conservation. So it is believed that the information generated in work are useful to the implantation of a forest restoration program in the region.