Bertholletia excelsa, known as Brazil nut, is an economically valuable tree species from the Amazon. Seeds of B. excelsa figure as one of the most important non-timber forest products in Bolivia, Brazil, and Peru. These seeds, however, have physiological dormancy, which makes the germination slow, irregular, and often in low percentages. Such biological feature represents a bottleneck to the production of high quality seedlings. In an experiment performed in Puerto Maldonado, Peru, ten fruits were collected per individual in 15 trees of B. excelsa in each of the two areas: an experimental planting and a native forest. Several variables regarding fruit biometry, germination, initial growth, and seedlings quality indexes were measured in order to compare B. excelsa seedlings produced by seeds from two areas and also regarding the lower and upper seed position inside the fruit. Both fruit l...

The lack of technological options for forest concessionaires to produce seedlings of native tree species in the Peruvian Amazon is a bottleneck for reforestation in the region. In this study, a new technology for seedlings production of low cost and accessible to producers was developed. Thus, the objective of this study was to evaluate the efficiency of using buckets as microenvironments under different substrates for the initial growth of Bertholletia excelsa seedlings. Forty days after germinating, the seedlings were transplanted to 115 cm³ tubes containing a standard substrate composed by sand + sawdust + charred sawdust in the proportion of 1:1:1 v/v. Afterwards, the tubes were settled in buckets (microenvironments) under a 100% shade net. The experimental design used in this study was fully randomized and the treatments were T1 = sand, T2 = sand + sawdust, T3 = decomposed Brazil n...