GALLERY FORESTS FLORA AND TREE STRUCTURE REINFORCE ATLANTIC FOREST OCCURRENCE IN BRAZILIAN CENTRAL PLATEAU

This study aimed to compare the phytosociological structure of two gallery forest patches; the flooded gallery forest and non-flooded gallery forest. Both were located in a forest remnant in the transition zone between Cerrado and Atlantic Forest biomes in south Goias state of Brazil. For each physiognomy, twenty-five 20 m x 20 m permanent plots were allocated including tree individuals with DBH1.3m >= 5.0 cm. The whole survey recorded 2628 individuals, belonging to 108 species distributed in 41 families. Flooded gallery forest showed higher density and basal area, although larger trees occurred more in non-flooded gallery forest. Both physiognomies showed floristic similarity and similarity in species/abundance relationship, probably due to the geographical proximity between them. The diversity index in flooded gallery forest was significantly lower than in non-flooded gallery forest. It was probably due to the low equitability in flooded gallery forest caused by the predominance of Euterpe edulis plants with 42.2% of the total density. This palm tree is characteristic of the Atlantic Forest and had the highest importance value in the study with density of 633 individual ha-1 in flooded gallery forest and 178 individual ha-1 in non-flooded gallery forest. In addition to the predominance of E. edulis, other floristic components recorded in the study pointed to a strong floristic connection of these gallery forests in south Goias between the Cerrado and Atlantic Forest.