Campo limpo

Figure 5.1 Campo limpo-cemdo sensu stricto transition on a Typic Quartzipsamment. Water table near the soil surface is responsible for the absence of cerrado tree species in the campo limpo in the foreground.

Mg ha i) in a cerrado sensu stricto. In the campo limpo, which is devoid of trees, the aerial biomass (5 5 Mg ha i) amounted to only 34% of the root biomass (16.3 Mg ha ) in the top 2 m of soil. This proportion was 31% in the campo sujo with its sparse distribution of trees and 47.9 to 53 3 in the cerrado sensu stricto. Thus the different cerrado vegetation types showed a higher root/shoot ratio than many tropical forests. 

Kauffman et al. (1994) estimated the fuel loads along a vegetation gradient from campo limpo to cerrado sensu stricto near Brasilia. In the cerrado only 27% of the fuel load of 10 Mg ha" was comprised of graminoids the remainder was deadwood and leaf litter. They estimated the nutrient pools in combustible components in the cerrado sensu stricto to be 54.7 kg ha" N, 13.8 kg ha K, 3-5 kg ha P, and 30.5 kg ha" Ca. They concluded that the total biomass of the herbaceous layer of the cerrados was similar to that of other savanna ecosystems. The authors concluded that any loss of N due to fire was negligible compared to the N pool in the soil. Biological N fixation and precipitation inputs would compensate for such losses. Similarly, precipitation inputs would compensate for the loss of P, K and Ca (Schiavini 1983, Coutinho 1979, Pivello-... 

Sp and Sg were estimated, respectively, from values of aboveground biomass of "campo sujo and "campo limpo" found by Kauffman et al. (1994), for a region of closed savanna near Brasilia. Value for Sp was extrapolated for Tp type. Biomass of roots was estimated assuming the value of 1.6 for the root/stem ratio adopted by Schroeder and Winjum (1995) for vegetation in the savanna/grassland class. 

In South America, and particularly in Brazil, the term cerrado (short for campo cerrado, closed field) was often used in a similar broad sense to inclnde everything from dry forest (strictly cerradao) to open grassland (campo limpo, clear, or clean, field). The divisions are defined by, among others, Eiten (1972), Furley (1999) and Oliveira-Filho and Ratter (2002), and the snbdivisions are now generally used more precisely. They are discussed in more detail later. 

Campo limpo (no large woody plants), campo sujo, sabana abierta, sabana lisa... 

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