André Braga Junqueira

Autonomous University of Barcelona | UAB · Institute of Environmental Sciences and Technologies (ICTA)

We evaluated farmers’ rationales to understand their decision making in relation to the use of fertile anthropogenic soils, i.e., Amazonian dark earths (ADE), and for dealing with changes in shifting cultivation in Central Amazonia. We analyzed qualitative information from 196 interviews with farmers in 21 riverine villages along the Madeira River....

Land-use change occurs nowhere more rapidly than in the tropics, where the imbalance between deforestation and forest regrowth has large consequences for the global carbon cycle. However, considerable uncertainty remains about the rate of biomass recovery in secondary forests, and how these rates are influenced by climate, landscape, and prior land...

Past human influences on Amazonian forest The marks of prehistoric human societies on tropical forests can still be detected today. Levis et al. performed a basin-wide comparison of plant distributions, archaeological sites, and environmental data. Plants domesticated by pre-Columbian peoples are much more likely to be dominant in Amazonian forests...

Extensive ecosystem restoration is increasingly seen as being central to conserving biodiversity1 and stabilizing the climate of the Earth2. Although ambitious national and global targets have been set, global priority areas that account for spatial variation in benefits and costs have yet to be identified. Here we develop and apply a multicriteria...

In a time of rapid global change, the question of what determines patterns in species abundance distribution remains a priority for understanding the complex dynamics of ecosystems. The constrained maximization of information entropy provides a framework for the understanding of such complex systems dynamics by a quantitative analysis of important...

Abandonment of agricultural lands promotes the global expansion of secondary forests, which are critical for preserving biodiversity and ecosystem functions and services. Such roles largely depend, however, on two essential successional attributes, trajectory and recovery rate, which are expected to depend on landscape-scale forest cover in non-lin...

Introduction: In the quest to improve the understanding of climate change impacts on elements of the atmospheric, physical, and life systems, scientists are challenged by the scarcity and uneven distribution of grounded data. Through their long history of interaction with the environment, Indigenous Peoples and local communities have developed com...

Climate-related changes taking place in Amazonia substantially impact social-ecological systems, affecting local livelihoods strongly reliant on natural resources. Here, we investigate climate change impacts on different livelihood activities in western Amazonia, through the lens of local ecological knowledge. We conducted semi-structured interview...

To investigate the geographic patterns and ecological correlates in the geographic distribution of the most common tree dispersal modes in Amazonia (endozoochory, synzoochory, anemochory and hydrochory). We examined if the proportional abundance of these dispersal modes could be explained by the availability of dispersal agents (disperser‐availabil...

In Amazonian foodplains, manioc four is the main plant food product and source of income for local populations. In the context of climate change, extreme fooding is more frequent and intense, making it difcult to cultivate and process manioc. As local knowledge is dynamic and fundamental to adapt in critical times, we studied local techniques for...

p>In this article, the abstract has been revised such that “30% of the total CO₂ increase in the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution” now reads “30% of the total CO₂ increase in the atmosphere, or 14% of total emissions, since the Industrial Revolution.” In addition, the second paragraph in the “Priority areas for resto...

Forests that regrow naturally on abandoned fields are important for restoring biodiversity and ecosystem services, but can they also preserve the distinct regional tree floras? Using the floristic composition of 1215 early successional forests (≤20 years) in 75 human-modified landscapes across the Neotropic realm, we identified 14 distinct floristi...

Research activities generate considerable carbon emissions. Some universities and research centers have implemented voluntary measures to reduce academia's carbon footprint. To contribute to the debate on pathways to decarbonize the academic sector, this work calculates the carbon emissions of an international research project in relation to 1) res...

This Report provides a comprehensive, objective, open, transparent, systematic, and rigorous scientific assessment of the state of the Amazon’s ecosystems, current trends, and their implications for the long-term well-being of the region, as well as opportunities and policy relevant options for conservation and sustainable development.

Current social-environmental changes such as climate change and biodiversity loss are interconnected and affecting people's livelihoods worldwide. Peasants are some of the most vulnerable to the impacts of these changes, but their knowledge and needs are rarely considered in public policy. The aim of this study was to document the (i) observed soci...

Climate change is an indisputable reality, but it seems that we still consider that it does not concern us directly, as if it only affected the melting ice in the Arctic, the polar bears or the glaciers of the Himalayas. We intend to show, through interviews with elderly people who live in rural areas and who have worked in activities in close cont...

Resilient secondary tropical forests? Although deforestation is rampant across the tropics, forest has a strong capacity to regrow on abandoned lands. These “secondary” forests may increasingly play important roles in biodiversity conservation, climate change mitigation, and landscape restoration. Poorter et al . analyzed the patterns of recovery i...

This Report provides a comprehensive, objective, open, transparent, systematic, and rigorous scientific assessment of the state of the Amazon’s ecosystems, current trends, and their implications for the long-term well-being of the region, as well as opportunities and policy relevant options for conservation and sustainable development.

In Amazonia, changes in the frequency and intensity of extreme climate events are occurring and expected to intensify, affecting food security with subsequent social and political problems. We conducted semi-structured interviews in communities of the mid-Solimões River basin (Amazonas, Brazil). Our questions were designed to construct seasonal cal...

The fast and widespread environmental changes that have intensified in the last decades are bringing disproportionate impacts to Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities. Changes that affect water resources are particularly relevant for subsistence-based peoples, many of whom already suffer from constraints regarding reliable access to safe water....

El cambio climático, fenómeno de carácter global, afecta todos los rincones y comunidades humanas y no-humanas a escala local. Uno de los medios de vida más afectados, de manera negativa por el cambio climático, es la agricultura familiar campesina (AFC). La AFC es principalmente practicada por comunidades locales (i.e., campesinos indígenas y no-i...

El cambio climático, fenómeno de carácter global, afecta todos los rincones y comunidades humanas y no-humanas a escala local. Uno de los medios de vida más afectados, de manera negativa por el cambio climático, es la agricultura familiar campesina (AFC). La AFC es principalmente practicada por comunidades locales (i.e., campesinos indígenas y no-i...

The forests of Amazonia are among the most biodiverse plant communities on Earth. Given the immediate threats posed by climate and land-use change, an improved understanding of how this extraordinary biodiversity is spatially organized is urgently required to develop effective conservation strategies. Most Amazonian tree species are extremely rare...

In this article, we make the case for home gardens to be understood as “open-air” laboratories— sites of experimentation, collaboration, and negotiation both among humans and non-humans. Our examination specifically draws on case studies from Amazonia to highlight the deep history of concentrated human activities in gardens (or garden-like environm...

In this article, we make the case for home gardens to be understood as “open-air” laboratories— sites of experimentation, collaboration, and negotiation both among humans and non-humans. Our examination spe- cifically draws on case studies from Amazonia to highlight the deep history of concentrated human activities in gardens (or garden-like enviro...

In a time of rapid global change, the question of what determines patterns in species abundance distribution remains a priority for understanding the complex dynamics of ecosystems. The constrained maximization of information entropy provides a framework for the understanding of such complex systems dynamics by a quantitative analysis of important...

Secondary forests are increasingly important components of human‐modified landscapes in the tropics. Successional pathways, however, can vary enormously across and within landscapes, with divergent regrowth rates, vegetation structure and species composition. While climatic and edaphic conditions drive variations across regions, land‐use history pl...

In August 2019, a major oil spill hit nine Brazilian coastal states, affecting marine ecosystems and fishing communities. In this study, we assess the immediate social and economic impacts of this oil spill on fishing communities of the northeast coast. We conducted semi-structured interviews and focal meetings with 381 fishers and shellfish gather...

Homogenization of crop portfolios from the field to the global scale is raising concerns about agricultural adaptation to climate change. Assessing whether such trends threaten farmers’ long-term adaptive capacity requires a thorough understanding of changes in their crop portfolios, identification of the drivers of change, and the implications suc...

First described over 120 years ago in Brazil, Amazonian Dark Earths (ADEs) are expanses of dark soil that are exceptionally fertile and contain large quantities of archaeological artefacts. The elevated fertility of the dark and often deep A horizon of ADEs is widely regarded as an outcome of pre-Columbian human influence. Controversially, in their...

The forests of Amazonia are among the most biodiverse plant communities on Earth. Given the immediate threats posed by climate and land-use change, an improved understanding of how this extraordinary biodiversity is spatially organized is urgently required to develop effective conservation strategies. Most Amazonian tree species are extremely rare...

Archaeological research provides clear evidence that the widespread formation of Amazonian Dark Earths (ADEs) in tropical lowland South America was concentrated in the Late Holocene, an outcome of sharp demographic growth that peaked towards 1000 BP. In their recent paper, however, Silva et al. propose that the high fertility of ADE is not of anthr...

As mudanças climáticas – especialmente o aquecimento global – vêm sendo percebidas em diferentes escalas por todo o planeta, e são muitos os esforços para compreender a magnitude desses impactos. Após a criação do Painel Intergovernamental de Mudanças Climáticas (IPCC) pela ONU, em 1988, construiu-se um extenso arcabouço científico que elucida a re...

Natural regeneration is key for large-scale forest restoration, yet it may lead to different biodiversity outcomes depending on socio-environmental context. We combined the results of a global meta-analysis to quantify how biodiversity recovery in naturally regenerating forests deviates from biodiversity values in reference old-growth forests, with...

The past three decades have seen the emergence of myriads of initiatives focused on conserving, revitalizing, and maintaining Indigenous and Local Knowledge (ILK) as part of biocultural approaches to conservation. However, the extent to which these efforts have been participatory has been often overlooked. In this chapter, we focus on five prominen...

William Denevan argued that pristine landscapes are a myth, including in Amazonia—imagined by many as one of the last bastions of pristine Nature. During the last century, evidence accumulated to show that humans domesticated Nature during the Holocene by creating cultural niches in all habitable regions of the planet. This process of cultural nich...

Although many important crops originated in Amazonia, the general patterns of their evolutionary histories are still obscure. Currently a major global food crop, manioc originated in southwestern Amazonia and was dispersed throughout the lowland Neotropics before the European conquest. However, little is known about the origin of the bitter and swe...

A high level of variation of biodiversity recovery within a landscape during forest restoration presents obstacles to ensure large‐scale, cost‐effective and long‐lasting ecological restoration. There is an urgent need to predict landscape variation in forest restoration success at a global scale. We conducted a meta‐analysis comprising 135 study la...

Tropical forests are known for their high diversity. Yet, forest patches do occur in the tropics where a single tree species is dominant. Such “monodominant” forests are known from all of the main tropical regions. For Amazonia, we sampled the occurrence of monodominance in a massive, basin-wide database of forest-inventory plots from the Amazon Tr...

Tropical forests are known for their high diversity. Yet, forest patches do occur in the tropics where a single tree species is dominant. Such “monodominant” forests are known from all of the main tropical regions. For Amazonia, we sampled the occurrence of monodominance in a massive, basin-wide database of forest-inventory plots from the Amazon Tr...

Tropical forests are known for their high diversity. Yet, forest patches do occur in the tropics where a single tree species is dominant. Such “monodominant” forests are known from all of the main tropical regions. For Amazonia, we sampled the occurrence of monodominance in a massive, basin-wide database of forest-inventory plots from the Amazon Tr...

Tropical forests are known for their high diversity. Yet, forest patches do occur in the tropics where a single tree species is dominant. Such “monodominant” forests are known from all of the main tropical regions. For Amazonia, we sampled the occurrence of monodominance in a massive, basin-wide database of forest-inventory plots from the Amazon Tr...

Tropical forests are known for their high diversity. Yet, forest patches do occur in the tropics where a single tree species is dominant. Such “monodominant” forests are known from all of the main tropical regions. For Amazonia, we sampled the occurrence of monodominance in a massive, basin-wide database of forest-inventory plots from the Amazon Tr...

Tropical forests are known for their high diversity. Yet, forest patches do occur in the tropics where a single tree species is dominant. Such “monodominant” forests are known from all of the main tropical regions. For Amazonia, we sampled the occurrence of monodominance in a massive, basin-wide database of forest-inventory plots from the Amazon Tr...

Tropical forests are known for their high diversity. Yet, forest patches do occur in the tropics where a single tree species is dominant. Such "monodominant" forests are known from all of the main tropical regions. For Amazonia, we sampled the occurrence of monodominance in a massive, basin-wide database of forest-inventory plots from the Amazon Tr...

Tropical forests are known for their high diversity. Yet, forest patches do occur in the tropics where a single tree species is dominant. Such "monodominant" forests are known from all of the main tropical regions. For Amazonia, we sampled the occurrence of monodominance in a massive, basin-wide database of forest-inventory plots from the Amazon Tr...

Most deforested lands in Brazil are occupied by low-productivity cattle ranching. Brazil is the second biggest meat producer worldwide and is projected to increase its agricultural output more than any other country. Biochar has been shown to improve soil properties and agricultural productivity when added to degraded soils, but these effects are c...

Tropical forests are converted at an alarming rate for agricultural use and pastureland, but also regrow naturally through secondary succession. For successful forest restoration, it is essential to understand the mechanisms of secondary succession. These mechanisms may vary across forest types, but analyses across broad spatial scales are lacking....

Tropical forests are converted at an alarming rate for agricultural use and pastureland, but also regrow naturally through secondary succession. For successful forest restoration, it is essential to understand the mechanisms of secondary succession. These mechanisms may vary across forest types, but analyses across broad spatial scales are lacking....

Amazonian dark earths (ADE) are anthropogenic soils mostly created between 500 and 2500 years ago by pre-Columbian populations. ADE are currently used by local people for different agricultural and agroforestry systems. Because of their high fertility they may play an important role in the conservation of non-native agrobiodiversity. This study aim...

Old-growth tropical forests harbor an immense diversity of tree species but are rapidly being cleared, while secondary forests that regrow on abandoned agricultural lands increase in extent. We assess how tree species richness and composition recover during secondary succession across gradients in environmental conditions and anthropogenic disturba...

In this chapter, the reader will find guidelines and suggestions for the application of ethnobotanical and ethnoecological methods in archaeological sites and their surroundings, aiming to establish a closer dialogue between ethnobiology and archaeology for understanding the human history of past and present landscapes. The goal of such methodologi...