Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Artigo Acesso aberto Produção Nacional Revisado por pares

BIBTEX RIS

Biomass production, B accumulation and Ca/B ratio in Eucalyptus under various conditions of water availability and B doses

2013; UNIVERSIDADE FEDERAL DE LAVRAS; Volume: 19; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1590/s0104-77602013000200013

2317-6342

Sílvio Júnio Ramos, Valdemar Faquin, Fabrício William Ávila, Rose Myrian Alves Ferreira, Josinaldo Lopes Araújo,

Growth and nutrition in plants

Soils destined for forest crops are often limiting with respect to boron (B) and in several eucalyptus crops boron deficiency has been found to be a common occurrence. The objective of this study is to evaluate biomass production, B accumulation and Ca/B ratio in eucalyptus cultivated under different conditions of soil, water availability and doses of B. To that end, an experiment was conducted using a completely randomized design with a 5 x 2 x 2 factorial arrangement consisting of five doses of B (0.00, 0.25, 0.75, 2.25 and 6.25 mg kg-1), two types of soil, namely a Dark Red Latosol (LE) and a Red-Yellow Latosol (LV), and two water tension levels (-0.033 and -0.010 MPa), with four replicates. After plants were grown, determinations were made of Ca and B contents as well as Ca/B ratios in different portions of the plants. Accumulation of B was obtained from the ratio of its contents to dry biomass in each plant portion. It was found that, under natural conditions, both Dark Red Latosol and Red-Yellow Latosol fail to meet the nutritional requirements for B in eucalyptus, potentially being limiting to that species. Overall, soil moisture influenced dry biomass production and accumulation of B only in the case of the more sandy texture soil (Red-Yellow Latosol), denoting that this factor is conditional on soil texture. Ca/B ratio results showed that application of B to the soil without a suitable supply of Ca can lead to an imbalance between these nutrients, with possible implications for plant growth and nutrition.