Driving a wedge into the Amazon

Abstract

Habitat loss and fragmentation are a pervasive threat to Earth's biodiversity. For those who study such things, the Biological Dynamics of Forest Fragments Project (BDFFP) in central Amazonia has, since 1979, been a scientific Mecca. Two hours north of the city of Manaus in Brazil, this 1,000-square- kilometre study area is home to the world's largest and longest-running experimental study of forest fragments1-3. Yet despite assurances from the Brazilian government, the BDFFP is now itself in imminent danger of becoming fragmented by rampant colonization (see map, overleaf). As the agricultural frontier expands, forest burning, logging and hunting are threatening to besiege the study area and drive a wedge deep into a crucial conservation corridor. For the BDFFP, is this the beginning of the end?The BDFFP is under particular pressure from the Manaus-Venezuela highway. Aside from slicing through the BDFFP, the highway bisects the Central Amazonian Conservation Corridor4, a budding network of protected and indigenous lands that is one of the most important conservation areas in the entire Amazon basin. These and other protected reserves in Amazonia are coming under increasing pressure as deforestation activity has spiked over the past decade5. For those Brazilian and foreign scientists who have studied at the BDFFP - and there are hundreds - the situation is all the more depressing as they fight against government bureaucracies that seem either myopically disinterested or determined to push ahead with forest colonization at any cost. The solution, the scientists believe, is to follow a carefully conceived land-use plan for the region that they themselves helped to devise. This plan, inexplicably, has yet to be released by the federal agency that sponsored it.