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Esperanca Chamba1, Alberto Manhica1, Jacob Bila1, Elias Secretario1, Paulo Valeriano Timoteo2, Martinho Bonomar2, Eunice Catarina Silo2 & Mauri Timonen3
1 Agrarian Research Institute of Mozambique (IIAM), Av. das FPLM, 2698 P.O. Box: 3658 Maputo, MOZAMBIQUE e-mail_ [email protected] The Faculty of Agronomy and Forestry Engineering, Eduardo Mondlane University (FAEF-UEM), Praça 25 de Junho, 257, C. P. 257 Maputo, MOZAMBIQUE 3 Finnish Forest Research Institute, Eteläranta 55, FIN-96300 Rovaniemi, Finland, e-mail: [email protected]
The Potential Of Dendrochronology For Tree Growth And Yield Studies In MozambiqueMozambique is a country endowed with vast forest resources, a source of livelihood of 80% of the population living in rural areas. About 54 millions of the country is covered by forests and other vegetation types from which 51% are classified as forests. The predominant ecoregions are Miombo and Mopane (Fig. 1.) proving the majority of wood species for domestic use and export. The sustainable management of this resource base for the economy and livelihood of Mozambique population is becoming increasingly important with the growing demand on forest products and services.
Climatic variability poses an additional pressure into forest resources since it affects their growth and productivity. Thus, scientific information regarding growth, yields and dynamic of forests are crucial. In the last 10 years, growth and yield studies through the establishment of permanent sampling plots (PSP) are conducted. These are long term studies and the monitoring of extreme climatic events and variability on the forest is not easy.
Dendrochronology is a useful complement to PSP since it gives faster and reliable results. There are some potential Mozambique tree-species for climate reconstruction, e.g. Millettia Stuhlmannii or Panga-panga (Fig. 2.) correlates positively with monthly and seasonal precipitation: rainfall during December and February explains about 43% of the chronology variation (Remane 2013).
Some initial studies on dendrochronology with the new equipment (Fig 3.) were done with encouraging results. This research aims at study the growth and yield patterns of three species used for timber and one for fuel wood in the south of Mozambique. Destructive and non-destructive methods are used for sampling. (Fig. 4). It is expected that the results will contribute to design sound polices that leads to a sustainable management of forest ecosystems in Mozambique.
Fig. 1. Map of the different types of natural vegetation
Fig. 4. Panga panga forest in Maputo
Fig. 2. Panga panga forest in Maputo
TYPES OF NATURAL VEGETATION
Mozambique
Fig. 3. Our tree-ring laboratory in Maputo uses high-resolution disk images and the Swedish Cdendro software. See closer description here.
1. Scanner Epson 10000 XL scans with maximum resolution of 4800 x 2400 pixels.
2.Silverfast AI Studio scanning software
Power Laptop (e.g. HP 8570w i7-3720QM 16GB)
3.User assisted semiautomatic measuring and dating usingthe Swedish CDendro and CooRecorder software.
