Mangroves on the Brazilian Amazon Coast: Uses and Rehabilitation

Mangroves are enormously important for the survival of traditional communities found in coastal zones around the world. This is typical of many areas in Brazil, in particular on the Amazon coast, which encompasses the largest continuous tract of mangrove forest found anywhere in the world. A multidisciplinary approach was used to describe the patterns of appropriation and uses of the resources available in this ecosystem, through the investigation of the local ecological knowledge of the traditional mangrove dwellers. Semi-structured interviews based on a set of specially formulated questions were used to better understand the knowledge of the local populations and their practices in relation to the mangrove. These people fish, harvest shellfish, and extract timber for both domestic and productive uses (e.g. construction of fishing weirs). In this region, the natural resources harvested by estuarine-coastal extractivists are used for both subsistence and sale. The principal problems in this region are the increase in the population, overfishing, predatory fishing practices, and the degradation of the mangroves. The initiative of the local community for reforesting degraded mangroves sites stimulated projects for the rehabilitation of the mangrove ecosystem in the surroundings of the communities. The establishment of new forest stands and return of invertebrate species, as Ucides cordatus, marked this rehabilitation. Ultimately, it is important to understand that the participative rehabilitation of the mangrove not only guarantees its productivity and the extractive activities, but also contributes to the development of the social, economic, political, and cultural dimensions of local communities, by reinforcing their perception of the need for measures to guarantee the sustainability and conservation of this ecosystem.