The Amazon Basin’s vast tropical rainforests, rivers, and soils are rich ecosystems vital to the basic functioning of the planet. They churn moisture into the atmosphere, sequester global carbon, regulate climate patterns, and house much of the world’s biodiversity.
But those extensive, interconnected ecosystems are increasingly fragmented and degraded by unsustainable agriculture and ranching, illegal logging, unmitigated mining, and exploitative commercial fishing practices.
Scientists from Virginia Tech’s College of Natural Resources and Environment — economists, fisheries and wildlife biologists, and international policy experts — are deeply engaged in the region, working in the Amazon’s critical ecosystems to understand and help reshape the daily land-use and natural resource management decisions that are currently driving deforestation, over-fishing, water degradation, and social inequity.
For almost two decades, economists Frank Merry and Gregory Amacher have been at the forefront of land-use change modeling in the Brazilian Amazon. Their work, in partnership with Brazil’s Federal University of Minas Gerais and the Woods Hole Research Center in Massachusetts, on simulated rent models, which forecast land use in logging, ranching, and agriculture, have led the way in the design of climate-related policies, including important international issues such as the U.N.’s REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) Program.
Furthermore, Merry, a research associate professor in the Department of Forest Resources and Environmental Conservation, and Amacher, the department’s Julian N. Cheatham Professor of Natural Resource Economics, along with graduate students, have long been seeking to address the problems faced by poor marginalized settlement families on the forest frontier. Similar to the Homestead Act in the U.S., Brazil is settling families in the far reaches of its territory, often in tenuous circumstances.
From the Augusta Free Press: https://augustafreepress.com/virginia-tech-scientists-work-to-help-save-the-amazon-rainforest-and-its-biodiversity/