HISTORY OF THE DESTRUCTION OF THE ARAUCARIA FOREST IN SOUTHERN BRAZIL

This article aims to discuss the causes and consequences of the devastation of Araucaria Forest during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Araucaria Forest is currently one of the most endangered forest formations of the Atlantic Forest biome. The dominant tree species is the Araucaria angustifolia (Bertol.) Kuntze, also called Brazilian pine or Parana pine. In the past the Araucaria forest covered an area of about 200,000 km2, distributed in the states of Parana, Santa Catarina and Rio Grande do Sul - with continuities in the province of Misiones, Argentina - as well as some smaller areas in southern Sao Paulo and Serra da Mantiqueira and isolated points of the state of Minas Gerais. Currently the remains are about 2% to 5% of its original area in Brazil, of which only 0.7% can be considered as primary forests. The sources used for this research were the most diverse as newspaper articles, government reports, government census and forest yearbooks published by the Brazilian National Institute of Pine.