African Mahogany Plantation Highlights in Brazil

Abstract

Planning and achieving sustainable forest resource management provides a fundamental contribution to reduce societies’ environmental impacts, and enhances the supply of forest products (FAO, 2019). In this sense, one genus that has gained interest among Brazilian foresters is Khaya, which contains all the species commonly known as African mahogany. This genus includes some of the highest-value timber species in African forests, which are under heavy exploitation pressure and listed as vulnerable by the IUCN (Pakull et al., 2019). African mahogany wood from native African forests is consolidated in the international timber trade, being employed for several high-end applications, such as furniture, sawnwood and veneers. While the majority of the commercially traded wood is originated from native African forests (ITTO, 2021), small scale use of wood from Brazilian plantations from few older plantations (circa 20 years old) as well as from thinning (circa 8 to 12 years old) have recently been applied with success for several uses, such as sawnwood, veneer faces, designer furniture and musical instruments (Ribeiro et al. 2019). According to Ribeiro et al. (2017), the history of African mahogany in Brazil began in the 70’s, when a researcher from Embrapa Amazônia Oriental received seeds from government officials from the Ivory Coast. These seeds were planted in Embrapa’s headquarters in Belém, Pará. Currently four of these trees still exist (from here on referred to as genotype trees), three of them individuals of excellent form and size. In the 90’s these trees began producing seeds, which were used to produce seedlings stock for new plantations, mainly in the North region. It was determined at this time that these trees belonged to the species K. ivorensis A. Chev. After these plantations started producing seeds, the plantation area of African mahogany expanded beyond the North to the other regions of Brazil, facilitated by the availability of seed lot and cloning techniques (e.g. Barroso et al., 2018) for seedling production. Although other African mahogany genetic material was imported from Africa during this time, the genotype trees and its descendants where the main provider of genetic material of most African mahogany plantations in Brazil, excluding K. senegalensis (Desr.) A. Juss. The fact that the genotype trees were incorrectly identified as K. ivorensis was raised in 2013, by comparing material from plantations with exemplars from the experimental plots of the Reserva Natural da Vale (RNV), located in the municipality of Abstract African mahogany is the common name of species from the Khaya genus and yields high value timber. It is planted in monocultures and agrosilvipastoral systems in Brazil since the 90’s. Here we relate the taxonomic identification of the most planted African mahogany species in Brazil, changing from Khaya ivorensis A. Chev. to K. grandifoliola C. DC. Currently we estimate there is circa 50 thousand hectares of plantations in Brazil, half concentrated in the Southeast region, with the most planted species K. grandifoliola, followed by K. senegalensis (Desr.) A. Juss.