The APA Sul was created to conciliate economic activities and natural resource conservation of forest, savanna, and grasslands of the metropolitan area of Belo Horizonte, SE Brazil. The aim of this study was to characterize the floristic composition and structure of the tree community of some forest remnants from APA Sul. We studied eight sites with distances among them up to 60 km, using the point-centered quarter method. In each area, we sampled 30 points, and measured circumference (> 15 cm) and height of trees. We found 55 families, 121 genera and 221 species. The number of families varied from 24 to 36 and, the number of species from 40 to 68. Mean height ranged from 9.1 to 11.5 m and, mean diameter from 10.8 to 17 cm. Floristic similarity indexes (Jaccard) among areas ranged from 5.8 to 23.4%, showing that the areas were very different. There was no significant relationship between geographic distance and similarity index. Shannon Diversity Indexes varied from 3.11 to 4.04 nats/individual. Biodiversity conservation in APA-Sul will depend on the public policies that guarantee the conservation of the largest possible number of forests and of the riparian forests that maintain the connectivity among preserved areas.
Biodiversity; conservation; semideciduous forest
