IUCN / SSC Cat Specialist Group - Digital Cat Library |
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| Aguiar Azevedo, A.; Gomes Monteiro J.L., | |
| Analysis of the Environmental Impacts of Crop and Livestock Activities in the Cerrado and Its Inter-relationship with Water Resources in the Pantanal | |
| 2002 Full Book | |
The Green Revolution, in the 1980žs, brought new hope to Brazil in terms of agricultural productivity, with high hopes of bounteous harvests and new technologies which allowed the exploitation of little-used regions, such as the Cerrado of Brazil's Centre-West region. In fact many of these expectations were realised, however, the "environmental backlash" generated costs which were often without a solution or unredeemable, as for example, the loss of bio-diversity and the drying up of water courses through silting, in addition to pollution. There are a variety of forms of degradation of water resources by the agricultural sector. In the Upper Paraguay River basin (BAP), bordering the Pantanal, there are regions of the Cerrado bioma much exploited by crop and livestock activities. Intensive use of these mostly sandy soils, combined with poor soil management practices, potentializes a natural erosion process, with silting of the streams of the planalto (high plateau), which will eventually affect the rivers of the Pantanal. Associated with the erosion problem is the indiscriminate use of Agricultural Chemicals (ACs), especially in the higher altitude regions, where annual cropping is more intensive, also with unquantified impacts on the Pantanal ecosystem. This study has as an objective to investigate which of the principal ecological processes are being affected in the BAP biomes - Cerrado and Pantanal - by the unchecked expansion of agricultural activities. |
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