{"id":223092,"date":"2016-08-22T16:06:51","date_gmt":"2016-08-22T19:06:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/?p=223092"},"modified":"2016-08-22T16:14:22","modified_gmt":"2016-08-22T19:14:22","slug":"agriculture-dries-out-the-cerrado","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/agriculture-dries-out-the-cerrado\/","title":{"rendered":"Agriculture dries out the Cerrado"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_215921\" style=\"max-width: 300px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-215921\" src=\"http:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/Tecno_Cerrado-e1460664088622-598x1024.jpg\" alt=\"Satellite images of Cerrado region: agricultural area doubled between 2003 (top) and 2013\" width=\"290\" height=\"496\" \/><p class=\"wp-caption-text\"><span class=\"media-credits-inline\">Mustard Lab \/ Universidade Brown<\/span>Satellite images of Cerrado region: agricultural area doubled between 2003 (<em>top<\/em>) and 2013<span class=\"media-credits\">Mustard Lab \/ Universidade Brown<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n<p>The more the native vegetation of the Cerrado gives way to agriculture, the lower becomes the volume of rainwater available to these crops.\u00a0 The warning comes from a study conducted by Stephanie Spera of Brown University (USA) and her collaborators, including Brazilian ecologist Marcia Macedo from the Woods Hole Research Center (<em><i>Global Change Biology<\/i><\/em>, March 29, 2016).\u00a0 The researchers analyzed satellite images taken over an 11-year period in the Matopiba, a region spanning the Brazilian states of Maranh\u00e3o, Tocantins, Piau\u00ed and Bahia.\u00a0 The photos revealed a major encroachment of the agricultural frontier into the area.\u00a0 In 2003, 1.2 million hectares of crops were visible.\u00a0 By 2013, agriculture had occupied 2.5 million hectares.\u00a0 Three quarters of the expansion in agricultural areas took place on lands once covered by native vegetation, almost all of it Cerrado.\u00a0 Also based on the satellite images, the researchers assessed the amount of water released into the air by plant leaves in a process called evapotranspiration.\u00a0 During the rainy season, from October to April, when crops are growing, evaporation in agricultural areas is similar to that seen in areas covered by native vegetation.\u00a0 The problem emerges during the dry months, between harvests.\u00a0 In the dry season, the volume of evapotranspiration in agricultural areas averages 60% lower than in areas with native vegetation.\u00a0 The risk is that this lack of moisture in the air may worsen droughts and ultimately postpone the start of the rainy season, shortening the productive period of the year.\u00a0 Because moisture circulates through air currents, the authors fear that the effects of these droughts may not be limited to the Cerrado and could end up affecting the Amazon.\u00a0 One way of mitigating the problem would be to plant two crops per year on the same soil, such as summer-harvest soybeans followed by late-harvest corn.\u00a0 This practice makes for a longer period of plant growth and may cause less of a reduction in evapotranspiration.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The larger the area for agriculture, the smaller the rainfall volume","protected":false},"author":475,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[168],"tags":[239],"coauthors":[785],"class_list":["post-223092","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technoscience","tag-geography"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223092","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/475"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=223092"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223092\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=223092"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=223092"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=223092"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=223092"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}