Resiliência dos sistemas socioecológicos e conhecimento ecológico local : um estudo sobre recursos lenhosos utilizados como combustível

Abstract

In studying the relationships between human groups and their respective environments, we consider two main systems involved, ecological and cultural. The interaction between these two systems is known as socioecological system. Because of their flexibility, these systems have a property called resilience, this is the ability of a socio-ecological system to restructure after a disturbance, maintaining its functions, identities and processes. One thing that can aid in the understanding of resilience is the study of local ecological knowledge (LEK). Several studies suggest that direct contact with the natural resource through collection practices may favor the LEK. From this, this study sought to investigate the local ecological knowledge associated to the use of firewood in the face of a scenario of socioeconomic changes that has altered the way people access the resource. We test the following hypothesis: the direct contact of the population with firewood, favored by the collection practices, contributes to the maintenance of local ecological knowledge. The study was carried out with three groups: collectors, buyers of firewood and people who abandoned the use of firewood. Semistructured interviews were conducted, free lists to check the list of known plants for firewood and interview checklist to verify the firewood recognition among the three groups analyzed. In order to test our hypothesis, ANOVA tests were performed to verify the difference in quantity among the species cited. A GLM was carried out to verify the relation between the time of abandonment of the firewood use and the knowledge. In addition, we performed a PEMANOVA analysis to verify if there were differences between the group of species mentioned as known by each group and a Spearman correlation to verify if the species with the highest quotations for firewood also have the highest number of recognitions. Our results did not present significant statistical differences, thus refuting our hypothesis and demonstrating that despite changes in the local socioeconomic context, knowledge about firewood is being kept constant. This result leads us to suggest that factors other than the direct contact for the collection and use of firewood are related to this maintenance of knowledge, we suggest as a possible factor the safety against future financial instabilities, considering that the acquisition of the fuel is people's purchasing power. In relation to species recognition, the specific morphological characteristics of other uses may be acting as rescue lanes of this memory, since the most cited plants for the use of firewood were not the most recognized. Although the current system is stable in the face of disturbances of economic origin that may arise, due to the complexity of the phenomenon we suggest that future studies seek to investigate the knowledge about the wood, evaluating which factors are in fact influencing the maintenance of the wood.