This article presents a 21st Century agenda for Amazonian conservation. The agenda calls for developing a system of refugia and a scientific methodology for predicting impacts of the infrastructure development vision for the region. It also calls for a collaborative approach to conservation planning, in the interest of fruitful engagement with decision-makers and stakeholders. The ideas explored here emerged from the collaboration of peers over a decade, which culminated in a panel presentation, Scientific Analysis, and Simulation Models to Support Conservation and Development Decision-Making, at the Tools and Strategies Workshop held at the University of Florida in October, 2017.
Simulating the response of land-cover changes to road paving and governance along a major Amazon highway: the Santarém–Cuiabá corridor
The spatial distribution of human activities in forest frontier regions is strongly influenced by transportation infrastructure. With the planned paving of 6000 km of highway in the Amazon Basin, agricultural frontier expansion will follow, triggering potentially...