Brazil

Brazil's Amazon Tropical Moist and Rain Forests

Field inventories of soil and vegetation

The work in the Brazilian Amazon is CIPEC's second area of strongest emphasis. The Amazon is an area experiencing very high rates of deforestation and carbon emission through cutting and burning of tropical moist vegetation. So far, we have undertaken studies in seven distinct areas: Marajó Island, the Bragantina Region, the Tomé-Açú Region, Altamira in the Lower Xingú Basin, Rondonia, Santarém in the Lower Tapajós Basin, and Manaus (Central and Amazon). These areas offer contrasting economic activities, environmental endowments, population densities, and length of settlement.

The study of land use change across sites representing Caboclo, Indigenous, and Colonist populations of different age, while linking household and community level analysis to regional patterns of change; in this context, we hope to understand how macro level factors, such as policy, inflation, and demographic dynamics interact with variables working at the household and community levels, such as availability of labor, land tenure, cultural background, access to technology and environmental resources that underly the rate, extent and direction of land use and cover change; understanding the role of soil fertility and land use history on the rate of secondary succession has also been an important part of this research. A particular focus has been to understand secondary successional regrowth dynamics to counter the literature's overemphasis on deforestation. The rates of regrowth in Amazônia are huge, with more than four tons per hectare per year in the most impoverished sites, and rates close to four times higher in more fertile areas with lower land use impacts. Even in the urban forest site at Manaus we have found impressive regrowth rates despite the growing pressure of an urban population around the edge of the forest. Research has also begun in Rondônia, an area characterized for the past 20 years for the highest rates of deforestation in the Amazon Basin. Studies here are linking the demography of households to property-level changes in land use and land cover.

 

Research sites in the Brazilian Amazon		Altamira, Brazil Supervised classification (July 1985) of an Altamira subsite derived from Landsat TM data, centered on the Transamazon Highway, and including the property grid

 

The Altamira site, Brazil Property grid of 3,174 parcels.  The GIS overlay of the property grid permits data extraction at property level

 

RELATED CIPEC PUBLICATIONS Tucker, J., E. Brondizio, and E. Moran. 1998. Rates of Forest Regrowth in Eastern Amazônia. Interciencia 23(2):64–73. Moran, E., A. Packer, E. Brondizio, and J. Tucker. 1996. Restoration of Vegetation Cover in the Eastern Amazon. Ecological Economics 18:41–54. McCracken, S., E. Brondizio, D. Nelson, E. Moran, A. Siqueira, and C. Rodriguez-Pedraza. 1999. Remote Sensing and GIS at Farm Property Level: Demography and Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. Photogrammetric Engineering and Remote Sensing 65(11):1311–1320. Brondizio, E., and A. Siqueira. 1998. From Extractivists to Forest Farmers: Changing Concepts of Caboclo Agroforestry in the Amazon Estuary. Research in Economic Anthropology 18:233–279.

Brazil's Atlantic Forests

A forest that was almost as vast as the Amazon, but of which less than eight percent remains, is the Atlantic forest. From the point of view of biodiversity, it is at least as important as Amazônia and provides a cautionary tale of how complete devastation can occur. We are undertaking collaborative research with colleagues at the University of Campinas and the Socio-Environmental Institute in São Paulo in the area of Vale da Ribeira—one of the most sizable patches of Atlantic forest remaining. A wide array of human communities live in and around this patch, in private, communal, or state-owned arrangements. This area also offers unusually rich resources for understanding the historical trajectories of deforestation—a history that closely parallels that of southern Indiana, except that Indiana has been on the rebound as a forest longer than São Paulo.

The steep terrain (left) of the Atlantic forest is a challenge to georeferencing (right)

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Last Updated: May 11, 2005
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