A planície aluvial do médio rio araguaia: processos geomorfológicos e suas implicações ambientais

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2006-05-29

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Universidade Federal de Goiás

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The Araguaia River is the most important fluvial system of South America. With an area of 380.000Km², it´s includes two phytogeography regions that have a good part of planet biodiversity: Cerrado, in the south, and Amazonia Forest, in the north of Brazil. The high level of Cerrado ecosystem destruction and changes in the land using, after 1965, promoted an intense sedimentation in fluvial system. This study is about the channel of Araguaia river, in a 580 km extension, between the city of Barra do Garças (MT) and the confluence of Cristalino and Araguaia Rivers. The multidisciplinary approach of this study has as aim analyze the channel geomorphic and middle reach alluvial plains processes causing environmental changes to the channel morphology and to vegetation succession, done by the erosive and sedimentary processes in the channel. The quantitative data were obtained through maps, air photographs and topographic charts from Landsat 1 MMS (1975) and Landsat 5 TM (1998). Using geoprocessing recourses were done areal reports of erosive and sedimentary plans and were applied mathematics equations to estimate sediments bulk and mass remobilized and stored in fluvial system. Were obtained also socioeconomics information about the Araguaia River basin area in Goiás, during the decades of 1960 and 2000, the cities of this same basin s GDP, the cattle growing statistics, vegetation and deforestation areas. The physical and socioeconomic data showed a correlation between the emergence of geomorphologic processes that had modified the channel, with the growth and development socioeconomics activities. The gotten results had disclosed that between 1965 and 1975, few changes had occurred in the fluvial channel. After 1975, a sped up erosion process of the channel edges and of islands has beginning, mobilizing the sediments, the bigger vegetation, as arboreal and bush arboreal type, that are associates to the oldest units of alluvial plain. With greater arrives of sediments that had entered in the channel, from the edges and the islands erosion, before steady, and in bigger degree, through the tributaries that drain the contribution basin area, modified for the use of the land (cattle and agriculture), the excess of sediments intensified the lateral sedimentation and the formation of bars of the central type, increasing the interlacement of the channel and, therefore, its morphology. It was estimated that between 1965 and 1998, about 233 million tons of sediments had been stored in the fluvial channel of Araguaia river. In the new sedimentation areas it was developed herbaceous vegetation adapted to the sandy surfaces. It was evident that it is occurring, in the plain, the substitution of a bigger vegetation, with bigger floristic diversity, for a grassy vegetation of the type herbaceous, associates to the formation of a geomorphologic unit younger and unstable to the erosive and sedimentary processes, because of the hydrologic channel behavior. This fact probably will bring consequences to the diverse biological processes associates to all alluvial plain. In one another approach, throughout the historical period of the analysis, was verified that as they increased the percentages of Cerrado natural vegetation areas in the area of the basin converted into agricultural areas and of cultivated pastures, the GDP of the cities also increased. The correlation between deforested areas, growth of the GDP, volume and mass of sediments stored in the fluvial system and increase of arenaceous bars in the channel resulted absolutely in satisfactory evidences in inferring that the economic growth of the region is in a relation of direct dependence with the changes in the use of the land of the Cerrado areas, and its ambient implications in the processes of morphologic changes in the Araguaia River channel and plain

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MORAIS, Roberto Prado de. The alluvial plain of the middle Araguaia River: geomorphological processes and their environmental implications. 2006. 178 f. Tese (Doutorado em Ciências Agrárias) - Universidade Federal de Goiás, Goiânia, 2006.