Tag: south america

Across the Amazon, roads and power lines cut through forest that once stretched unbroken for hundreds of kilometers. The resulting fragments pose serious challenges for wildlife. Many species survive by moving through the canopy, yet the gaps created by infrastructure force them to descend to the ground or prevent them from moving between trees. Mortality from vehicle strikes is one risk. Isolation may prove the more consequential one, gradually eroding the genetic health of populations.

Researchers are exploring relatively simple ways to restore some of that lost connectivity, reports Luís Patriani. 

In Peru’s Napo-Sucusari Biological Reserve, near the city of Iquitos, two biologists from the State University of New York at Binghamton installed a series of experimental canopy bridges. Nets, ropes and small platforms were suspended between treetops, forming corridors that allow animals to move from one tree to another.

Camera traps recorded the results over several weeks. Sloths, saki monkeys and an Amazonian long-tailed porcupine used the structures, offering a glimpse of how arboreal mammals respond when given a path across the canopy. Such observations may seem modest. For conservation planners, however, they provide useful information about how animals move and which bridge designs they will use.

Elsewhere in South America, similar efforts are being tested along highways. In Brazil’s Atlantic Forest, researchers have linked trees with simple rope crossings where primates had been killed attempting to cross roads. Within days, monkeys were using them.

The structures are straightforward and inexpensive. Their value lies in what they restore: the ability for animals to move through forests that infrastructure increasingly divides.

The story: https://news.mongabay.com/2026/03/across-south-america-canopy-bridges-evolve-as-a-lifeline-for-tree-dwelling-wildlife/

Header image: Howler monkeys using an artificial bridge at Fontes do Ipiranga State Park in São Paulo. Image courtesy of the São Paulo State Secretariat of Infrastructure and Environment (SEMIL).

Suriname’s government is seeking to unwind a contentious agribusiness contract that could lead to the clearance of more than 100,000 hectares of Amazon rainforest, raising questions about the country’s environmental governance and its prized carbon-negative status.

In 2024 the agriculture ministry entered a public-private partnership with Suriname Green Energy Agriculture N.V. to develop 113,465 hectares of forest in the northwestern district of Nickerie. Although large-scale development did not begin immediately, officials say the legal framework remained in force, allowing clearing to start in recent months. The project area largely overlaps with logging concessions governed by sustainability rules intended to safeguard primary forest.

Environmental concerns extend beyond Suriname’s borders. “This is not just a local issue. This is a regional issue because of the role rainforests play on the continent,” John Goedschalk, a climate adviser to the president, told Mongabay’s Max Radwin. He warned that “the continued deforestation in the Guiana Shield endangers access to water for people all the way to Argentina.”

Internal government emails reviewed by Mongabay suggest the company began clearing without permits from the National Environmental Authority. Officials are now examining whether this procedural lapse could provide grounds to terminate the contract. “We might be able to cancel this contract just on that basis,” Mr. Goedschalk said.

The episode reflects broader tensions over economic development and conservation in a country where forests cover about 93% of the territory. Previous efforts to expand industrial agriculture, including proposals to allocate land to Mennonite farmers, have met public resistance. Critics argue that weak coordination between agencies and unclear oversight have compounded uncertainty. “Nobody knows what is happening,” said Erlan Sleur, president of the environmental group ProBios.

For a nation that has long promoted its environmental credentials, the outcome may carry lasting economic and political consequences.

Bolivia is adding land to its protected estate at a moment when forest loss is accelerating. Over the past several months, local governments and Indigenous communities have created four new protected areas totaling just over 900,000 hectares, stretching from Amazonian lowlands to Andean foothills. The scale is notable. So is the way it has been done, reports Max Radwin.

The new areas were planned and approved at the municipal level, often linking Indigenous territories with existing national parks. The aim is practical: to keep forests intact across larger landscapes so wildlife can move, rivers remain functional, and rural economies based on standing forest can endure. In several cases, municipalities have placed more than half of their territory under some form of protection.

That local initiative contrasts with national trends. Bolivia expanded its national protected areas aggressively in the early 2000s, but momentum slowed. In the past five years only two national parks have been created or upgraded. Meanwhile deforestation has surged, driven by agriculture, cattle ranching, mining, and fire. In 2025 the country lost 1.8m hectares of tree cover, according to satellite data.

Against that backdrop, municipalities have begun acting on their own. In Pando, along the Brazilian border, residents of Santos Mercado created the Guardián Amazónico Pacahuara Integrated Natural Management Area, protecting more than 540,000 hectares. Mining and logging had begun to affect water supplies and Brazil-nut harvests, the backbone of the local economy.

“That’s where the initiative was born,” said Ericka Cortez, president of the municipal council. “The concern to conserve the environment, to conserve our Amazon, our forest and more than anything: the beauty of our Brazil nut.”

Other areas respond to similar pressures. In La Paz department, Indigenous Mosetén communities backed a new municipal park to protect watersheds needed for cacao and coffee. Elsewhere, new reserves are intended to curb illegal gold mining and connect established parks through migration corridors.

Support from conservation groups and international donors helped turn local plans into legal designations. Long-term management will be harder. Municipal governments have limited budgets and enforcement capacity. Sustaining these areas will depend on outside financing and on whether forest-based livelihoods can reliably outcompete clearing land.

In the leaf litter of Brazil’s Atlantic Forest, scientists have added another name to a genus that seems determined to rewrite its own census. A pinky-nail-sized frog, bright orange and barely a centimeter long, has been described as a species new to science. It has been christened Brachycephalus lulai, after Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

The frog belongs to a group sometimes called flea toads, a lineage notable for its extremely small size and for the pace at which new species are being discovered. Of the 42 known Brachycephalus species, most have been described this century, often from single mountaintops or narrow bands of forest. The latest addition was found at two nearby sites in the Serra do Quiriri in southern Brazil, concealed among damp leaves in montane cloud forest.

Researchers confirmed its novelty by comparing DNA, body form, and its distinctive mating call with those of close relatives. Males are under 12 millimeters long; females slightly larger. For now, the species appears secure. “The new species occurs in highly preserved forests that are very difficult to access, which means it is not threatened with extinction,” Marcos R. Bornschein, one of the study’s authors, told Popular Science.

That reassurance comes with caveats. Elsewhere in the same mountain range, grassland burning, grazing, mining, and invasive pines are eroding habitats that host other, more vulnerable frogs. Climate change also could affect its niche habitat.

B. lulai underscores how incomplete scientific inventories remain, even in forests long assumed to be well mapped. In the Atlantic Forest, it turns out, there is still room for small discoveries.

The Medio Putumayo Algodón Regional Conservation Area, covering more than 283,000 hectares of pristine rainforest in Loreto, was established in June and will be managed by the regional government. For the 16 Indigenous communities who live along the Putumayo River, the designation represents both protection and recognition, reports Geraldine Santos.

“This area is being driven by the Indigenous communities of the Medio Putumayo themselves, through three federations,” says Freddy Ferreyra of the Instituto del Bien Común.

Local peoples, including the Murui, Yagua, Ocaina, Kukama Kukamiria, Kichwa, Maijuna and Bora, have been pressing for safeguards for over a decade. Now they gain legal standing to defend their forests against incursions by land traffickers, miners and loggers.

The new area sits within a larger ecological corridor that links Peru with Colombia and Ecuador. It forms part of a mosaic of reserves and parks intended to secure continuous habitat for species ranging from jaguars and river dolphins to the yellow-tailed woolly monkey.

“We hope this regional conservation area brings benefits to our communities,” says Gervinson Perdomo Chavez, a former leader of Puerto Franco. “That way, we can also take care of our forest.”

In the western Brazilian Amazon, scientists have documented the world’s largest known nesting aggregation of the endangered giant South American river turtle (Podocnemis expansa), reports Shanna Hanbury. Using drones and ground counts on a sandbank of the Guaporé River, which marks the border with Bolivia, researchers estimated around 41,000 adult females gathering to lay their eggs.

“We knew it was an important area, but we didn’t have the full picture of the size,” said Camila Ferrara of WCS.

The population has grown in part thanks to Brazil’s four-decade conservation program, carried out with local communities. Yet threats persist. Illegal traders continue to seize turtles by the hundreds, while habitat loss looms. Turtle meat, once sustainably harvested, has long been a staple in Amazonian diets—ranking second only to fish in archaeological records from 7,000 years ago—but today’s demand far outpaces historical levels.

To count the nesting turtles, the scientists combined ground surveys, drone imagery and mathematical models to correct for errors such as double counting or missed individuals. The method produced a more credible estimate than either approach alone and offers a stronger tool for monitoring mass nesting events. By improving accuracy, it allows conservationists to distinguish genuine declines from statistical noise—vital knowledge in the struggle to protect one of the Amazon’s most threatened species.

Healthy forests are more than climate shields; in the Amazon, they also serve as public-health infrastructure.

A Communications Earth & Environment study spanning two decades across the biome links the extent and legal status of Indigenous Territories to 27 respiratory, cardiovascular, and zoonotic or vector-borne diseases. The findings are complex, but one pattern is clear: Where surrounding forest cover is high and fragmentation is low, Indigenous lands help blunt health risks.

Between 2001 and 2019, the Amazon logged 28 million cases of illness, four-fifths of them from fires and mostly respiratory. More than 532,000 square kilometers burned during that period, with most blazes starting outside Indigenous lands. Each surge in fire activity sent fine particulate pollution (PM2.5) higher, and with it hospital visits for asthma, bronchitis and other respiratory ailments.

Landscape context matters. Municipalities with high forest cover outside Indigenous lands see fewer fire-related illnesses, as those forests buffer PM2.5 exposure. The protective effect appears once overall cover exceeds about 45%. For zoonotic and vector-borne diseases, forests inside and outside Indigenous lands offset fragmentation when combined cover passes 40%. Fragmentation weakens these protections.

Law matters too. Recognized Indigenous Territories show a nonlinear pattern: at low to mid coverage they correlate with higher incidence, but at higher coverage with lower incidence. Unrecognized territories are consistently tied to worse outcomes, reflecting heavier fire and deforestation where rights are weak.

“Indigenous forests in the Amazon bring health benefits to millions,” said Paula Prist of the International Union for Conservation of Nature in a statement. “We have long known that the rainforest is home to medicinal plants and animals that have cured countless illnesses. This study offers new evidence that forests themselves are a balm for fire-related threats to people’s lungs and hearts, to illnesses like Chagas, malaria and spotted fevers. Ensuring Indigenous communities have strong rights over their lands is the best way to keep forests and their health benefits intact.”

As fire season returns and climate talks convene in Belém, the message is straightforward: securing Indigenous land rights and conserving contiguous forests is a health intervention as well as a climate one.

Eight years after its launch, a solar-powered canoe initiative born in Ecuador’s Amazon is reshaping river transport far beyond its origins, reports Aimee Gabay.

The Kara Solar Foundation, led by Indigenous engineers and community leaders, has delivered 12 canoes to villages in Ecuador, Peru, Brazil, Suriname and even the Solomon Islands. Each vessel glides silently across rivers that once echoed with the noise and fumes of gasoline engines.

For many communities, rivers are the only roads. Solar boats spare them the cost of fuel while reducing pollution.

“[They] do not pollute the environment, especially for those who live near rivers,” said Ichinki Tentets Tanchim Federico, a leader of the Achuar community of Wayusentsa.

The boats also diminish pressure to build roads, which often accelerate deforestation and the spread of mining and livestock.

The first canoe, Tapiatpia, proved the concept in 2017 when it traveled 1,800 kilometers across Amazonian rivers. Since then, Kara Solar has paired its boats with solar recharge stations that double as community energy hubs. Local residents are trained to operate and repair the systems themselves.

“Kara Solar ensures that technical knowledge is cultivated within the communities,” says Nantu Canelos, the foundation’s executive director.

Ambitions run high: By 2030, the group aims to support 10,000 solar canoes across the Amazon Basin and create a network of Indigenous-run recharge stations. Yet financing remains elusive.

“Projects like this…are not attractive for traditional investment because they are not designed to obtain large gains quickly,” Canelos said.

Still, in regions where infrastructure is sparse, these solar vessels offer a rare chance to chart a different future—quietly, cleanly, and on local terms.

For decades, the Amazon has been growing drier. A new study in Nature Communications disentangles how much of this shift is due to global warming and how much to tree loss within the forest. The results suggest deforestation is the dominant factor.

Researchers led by Marco Franco and Luiz Augusto Toledo Machado examined 35 years of land-use and atmospheric data across Brazil’s “Legal Amazon,” an area of 5 million square kilometers. Using statistical models, they separated the effects of greenhouse-gas emissions from local forest loss. They found deforestation accounts for nearly three-quarters of the rainfall decline and about one-sixth of the warming during the dry season since the mid-1980s.

Between 1985 and 2020, dry-season rainfall fell by about 21 millimeters per year, of which 15.8mm—74.5%—was linked to forest loss. Maximum daily temperatures rose by 2°C, with 0.39°C, or 16.5%, due to deforestation. The findings confirm what scientists have long suspected: forest clearance disrupts not only carbon balances but also local weather.

Amazonian trees are central to this system. Through transpiration they draw water from the soil and release it into the air, providing more than 40% of the region’s rainfall. This moisture rises and condenses into clouds, while creating low-pressure zones that pull in additional humid air, a process some call the “biotic pump.” Strip away forest and the cycle falters.

The consequences extend beyond the basin. The “flying rivers” of vapor influence rainfall across Brazil’s agricultural heartlands and into the Andes. Deforestation is also altering the South American monsoon, raising the risk of drought in central and southeastern Brazil.

If recent trends continue, by 2035 the region could see dry-season rainfall fall by another 7mm and temperatures climb by 0.6°C. The Amazon’s climate could begin to resemble that of the Cerrado savanna or even the semi-arid Caatinga.

Such a shift would test the resilience of the forest’s 11,000 known tree species, the communities that depend on them, and distant agricultural zones and megacities that rely on the Amazon’s moisture.

🔬 Franco, M.A., Rizzo, L.V., Teixeira, M.J. et al. How climate change and deforestation interact in the transformation of the Amazon rainforest. Nature Communications 16, 7944 (2025). https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-63156-0

Perched high above the forest floor, the tropical canopy is a reservoir of biodiversity that has long resisted scrutiny. Its inaccessibility has left many of its inhabitants—orchids, epiphytes, ants, monkeys, frogs—poorly studied and poorly protected. But a new study offers a workaround: let the rain do the climbing. 

Scientists led by Lucie Zinger at the French National Centre for Scientific Research have shown that water dripping from the canopy carries traces of DNA from the organisms above. By capturing and analyzing this “rainwash” in low-tech collectors, they identified hundreds of species across plants, insects, birds, amphibians, and mammals.

The study, conducted in French Guiana, compared samples from a mature Amazonian forest and a nearby tree plantation. The results were striking. Diversity was markedly higher in the undisturbed forest, where passive collectors accumulated eDNA over a ten-day period. Crucially, the rainwash signal was both local and persistent. Even after heavy rain, biodiversity signatures remained spatially distinct at the scale of tens of meters and stable for up to 40 days.

Unlike airborne or stream-based eDNA, which can drift and muddle geographic origin, rainwash captures a sharp snapshot of the immediate canopy. It can also be deployed at scale with minimal cost. The researchers propose that this method could become a cornerstone of biodiversity monitoring in tropical forests—habitats that are increasingly threatened and chronically under-surveyed.

That is not to say it is a panacea. Detection remains limited to species that shed detectable DNA and to wet seasons where rainfall is sufficient. But in a field stymied by logistical and financial constraints, the ability to “listen” to the canopy through its own runoff is a conceptual advance. In the future, the hum of the rainforest may be traced not through what can be seen and heard, but through what the rain leaves behind.

Lucie Zinger et al. (2025) Elusive tropical forest canopy diversity revealed through environmental DNA contained in rainwater. Science Advances 11, DOI:10.1126/sciadv.adx4909

In Brazil and across the Amazon Basin, a growing body of evidence confirms what many Indigenous communities have long known: hundreds of voluntarily isolated Indigenous groups continue to live deep in the forest, avoiding contact with the outside world. But for decades, their existence was denied or ignored by states, leaving them legally invisible and their lands open to extraction, deforestation, and exploitation.

That is slowly changing. A new 302-page report—launched in April 2025 at the U.N. Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues—offers a scientific framework for recognizing these groups without violating their autonomy.

Antenor Vaz, a veteran expert on isolated and initially contacted peoples (PIACI) who recently spoke with Aimee Gabay, co-authored the report with input from national Indigenous organizations such as AIDESEP in Peru. It catalogs 188 records of voluntarily isolated peoples in South America—yet just 60 are officially recognized by states.

Recognition matters. Without legal recognition, Indigenous peoples have no claim to territory, protections, or voice.

As Vaz puts it: “They have no rights because they do not exist for the state.”

Denial, he warns, is often politically motivated: once land is acknowledged as inhabited, it must be protected. That complicates plans for agribusiness, mining, and logging.

The report outlines both “direct” and “indirect” methodologies for evidence-gathering—from satellite imagery and field expeditions to local Indigenous knowledge. While states tend to privilege Western scientific methods, Vaz stresses that Indigenous trackers and shamans often provide the most accurate data. Their knowledge, he argues, is holistic, drawing on spiritual and ecological cues beyond the grasp of many Western institutions.

The implications go beyond Indigenous rights. Isolated peoples are entirely dependent on intact ecosystems. Their continued survival requires forests to remain undisturbed, making them natural stewards of biodiversity.

“For isolated peoples,” Vaz notes, “the forest is their pharmacy, supermarket, school, and city.”

Protecting their land helps protect the Amazon—and, by extension, global climate stability.

The report offers 11 core principles, including the foundational rule: No contact. That principle, enshrined in Brazil’s 1988 Constitution, has become a model for others.

As states weigh economic growth against Indigenous survival, Vaz says this document serves as a guide for navigating that fraught terrain—scientifically, ethically, and lawfully.