Aboveground biomass of a Eucalyptus hybrid subjected to two water regimes

Abstract

The objective of this work was to estimate the aboveground biomass production of 76-month-old, Eucalyptus urophylla × Eucalyptus sp. hybrids, subjected partial exclusion of throughfall. The experiment used two water regimes: one treatment with throughfall (WET), receiving 100% of the throughfall, and the other treatment with the partial exclusion of throughfall (PET), receiving only 70%. The selected trees were sectioned and fractionated into the following components: leaves, branches, stembark, and stemwood. The WET treatment had higher total biomass (221.00 Mg ha-1) than the PET treatment (206.26 Mg ha-1) and the distribution of biomass for both treatments was as follows: stemwood > branches > stembark > leaves. The stem (wood + bark) accounted for 91.5% of the total biomass in the WET treatment and 91.2% in the PET treatment. The canopy (leaves + branches) accounted for 8.5% and 9.0% in the WET and PET treatments, respectively. These results indicate that this Eucalyptus hybrid maintained satisfactory biomass production, despite the lower availability of water.