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Community-based sheries management exert a
vast value-added effective protection footprint in
Amazonian forests
Ana Carla Rodrigues ( anacarlabio@hotmail.com )
Universidade Federal de Alagoas https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7687-1502
Hugo Costa
Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas da Amazônia; Instituto Juruá
Carlos Peres
University of East Anglia
Eduardo Brondízio
Indiana University https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9376-8366
Adevaldo Dias
Memorial Chico Mendes
José Dias
Instituto Juruá; Associação dos Moradores Agroextrativistas do Baixo Médio Juruá (AMAB),
Comunidade Lago Serrado
Pedro Constantino
RedeFauna - Rede de Pesquisa em Diversidade, Conservação e Uso da Fauna da Amazônia
Richard Ladle
Federal University of Alagoas
Ana Malhado
Universidade Federal de Alagoas https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3621-779X
Joao Campos-Silva
Norwegian University of Life Sciences https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4998-7216
Article
Keywords: Communal conservation, co-management, environmental protection, Amazonia, sustainable
development, tropical forest
Posted Date: January 23rd, 2024
DOI: https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-3782947/v1
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Abstract
Community-based conservation has gained traction in the Brazilian Amazon due to its potential in
combining territorial protection, local well-being, and biodiversity conservation. Here, we conducted an
innovative assessment of the effective protection footprint of the largest community-based sheries
conservation arrangement in the Amazon. Local communities effectively protected between 1 and 13
lakes, which were on average 47.4 ha in size. However, the effective protection area was approximately 8-
fold larger than the extent of direct protection, dened as the immediate focal area sustaining nancial
returns through co-management. The additional protection of a ‘functional area’ was on average 11,188
ha, or 36-fold larger than the directly protected area. Although the average cost of effective protection
was low (US$0.95 ha‒1 yr‒1), this was entirely incurred by low-income local communities Our study
underscores the remarkable effort leveraged by Amazonian rural communities in protecting natural
ecosystems and the imperative need to develop compensation mechanisms to nancially reward them,
which are currently lacking.
1. Introduction
Community-based conservation (CBC), in which local communities lead the management and
conservation of natural resources, is one of the most promising conservation strategies in developing
tropical countries (Berkes, 2007). There are several signicant potential co-benets of CBC initiatives
(Brooks et al., 2012). First, CBC ensures biodiversity conservation by promoting sustainable land use
practices and critical habitat protection (Campos-Silva et al., 2018). Second, it can generate income and
create employment opportunities for local communities through ecotourism, sustainable harvesting of
natural resources, and other forms of income generation (Ruiz-Ballesteros and Brondizio, 2013). Third, it
can improve social and economic well-being locally by enhancing food security and providing greater
access to social services and infrastructure (Campos-Silva et al., 2021; Campos-Silva and Peres, 2016).
Fourth, it promotes participatory decision-making, which can enhance the sense of ownership and
responsibility among local communities (Ostrom, 2009). Finally, CBC can contribute to the achievement
of global conservation goals by effectively conserving biodiversity, building capacity and facilitating
knowledge-sharing among stakeholders (Esmail et al., 2023).
CBC is viewed as an ideal, yet feasible, conservation approach in the Amazon because it combines
territorial protection, local welfare, and biodiversity conservation, while also generating income and
preventing biodiversity loss (Campos-Silva et al., 2019; Campos-Silva and Peres, 2016). One of the most
emblematic CBC initiatives in the Neotropics is the co-management of pirarucu, or giant arapaima
(
Arapaima gigas
) sheries in Amazonia (Campos-Silva and Peres, 2016; Freitas et al. 2020). In this
context, territorial protection is a particularly important component of CBC because it underpins source-
sink dynamics in harvested Amazonian landscapes and, by extension, is instrumental for the recovery of
several historically overexploited species (Arantes et al., 2022; Campos‐Silva et al., 2019).
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CBC-mediated territorial protection on a full-time basis is ensured by 24-by-7 environmental surveillance,
which deters poaching by both local and external resource users (Franco et al., 2021). Community
territorial surveillance restricts accessibility for outsiders and enforces protection rules. These rules are
enforced by punitive actions, including the retention of conscated products and materials, removal of
trespassers from the territory, and notication to appropriate government agencies. Surveillance activity
(which began in 1995) was instrumental in the development of ‘shing agreements’ (i.e., a formal
commitment to comply with management rules among shing communities sharing an interconnected
system of oodplain lakes) and, as of 2002, the subsequent consolidation of a community-based
environmental protection system (Franco et al., 2021). The CBC approach has been a remarkable
conservation success. For example, wild arapaima populations have increased by 425% along the Juruá
River (Campos-Silva and Peres, 2016), reecting similar patterns in other river basins that adopted this
approach (Castello et al., 2009; Petersen et al., 2016). Arapaima co-management also benets a wide
range of emblematic large-bodied aquatic vertebrates, including black caimans (
Melanosuchus niger
),
Giant River turtle (
Podocnemis expansa
), and tambaquis (
Colossoma macropomum
) (Campos-Silva et
al., 2019).
The main local motivation to carry out co-management of arapaima activities is to accrue demographic
benets to resource populations resulting in both subsistence and direct income (Freitas et al., 2020).
Nevertheless, the economic costs of territorial surveillance amount to a heavy burden for under-privileged
local communities, which potentially threatens the long-term viability of this agship conservation
program. In this sense, the Arapaima CBC case poses a familiar common-pool resource dilemma:
improvements in sh population through management allows for predictable appropriation quotas by
shers who, in turn, have to provide monitoring and enforcement [at high costs] to secure the sustainable
management of sh population and lakes. Adding to the costs of monitoring and compliance, shing
communities face high logistical costs to commercialize their shing quotas. Research on CBC suggests
that conservation policies need to provide adequate incentives to stimulate local economic interests and
mobilize individual and collective commitments to formalize conservation-oriented actions (Londres et
al., 2023; Seixas and Berkes, 2010). Therefore, asymmetries between positive large-scale conservation
outcomes and low socioeconomic benets pose a major challenge to the continued sustainability of CBC
efforts (Campos-Silva et al., 2019).
One way to meet some of these costs would be Payment for Environmental Services (PES) programs co-
designed with communities to provide compensation for the use, stewardship and/or benign
management of the resource supply to ensure certain environmental services. Participants in PES
programs can be individuals, enterprises, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), private institutions or
the wider public if they are direct or indirect beneciaries of territorial protection (Wunder, 2015).
Here, we quantitatively assess the impact of the largest community-based conservation program in
Brazilian Amazonia by examining the full extent of community-led environmental surveillance and their
associated costs considering 96 protected lakes located along the Juruá River, a major tributary of the
Amazon. Specically, we estimate the full spatial extent of oodplain and upland forests that a
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community can effectively guard as a consequence of CBC, and the economic cost incurred by this
surveillance, which are currently borne out by the communities. We use these estimates to highlight the
enormous effort invested by Amazonian rural communities to ensure the protection of natural
ecosystems, arguing for the development of new governance and nancial tools to reward strong local
conservation measures by legitimate resource users as a cost-effective and socially just approach to
ensure forest protection. Finally, we discuss the potential viability of PES approaches to support
community-based conservation efforts and reduce the asymmetry between the costs of conservation
investments incurred locally and environmental benets accrued at much larger spatial scales.
2. Results
2.1 Operational structure of community-led protection
Local guards covering a oodplain area are community members who participate in arapaima
management, who may be organized in pairs or small teams of up to eight people. The rotation among
the teams is determined by the community and is established depending on the physical environment,
such as the location of the lakes, lake accessibility, distance to the community support base, and number
of guards available in the community (Fig.1). In general, surveillance forays could range from six hours
to seven consecutive days, but in a few communities the guard lived in a oating house on the lake all
year-round. Surveillance costs are mostly paid for by community members themselves, in which
household food and fuel supplies are made available to enable travel to the vicinity of each surveillance
site. However, a few communities included surveillance costs as part of the total cost of arapaima
management. The most critical season for surveillance was when the level of oodwaters was receding.
Illegal shers at this time could rapidly move into a lake and harvest protected stocks of commercially
desirable sh species, resulting in the remaining stock to relocate from any given lake in search of safer
sites elsewhere (Fig.2).
2.2 Community-based protection footprint
A total of 96 protected oxbow lakes hosting a population count of approximately 109,000 adult
arapaima, and under the direct jurisdiction and stewardship of 14 rural communities, were mapped along
the Juruá River (Fig.3). These communities were on average spaced by 82.8 km from the nearest town
(range = 51.78–110.9 km). Each of these communities on average contained 12.6 families (range = 2–
32), with a total of 177 families participating in community-based lake surveillance. On average, 6.4 lakes
(range = 1–13) were protected per community, with individual lakes accounting for a mean dry-season
area of 47.39 (± 82.26) ha. The spatial extent of
direct protection
was on average 305 ha per community,
but the wider territorial protection resulting from effective protection was on average 2,346 ha (Table1,
Fig.4). In other words, the extent of effectively protected areas was almost eight-fold larger than the
aggregate size of all protected lakes within the jurisdiction of any given community, which corresponds to
the actual focal area that derived nancial returns through co-management. The functional area of
oodplains supporting co-management was even larger: on average this amounted to 11,189 ha per
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community, an area ~ 36-fold larger than the directly protected area (ANOVA, Df = 4, F = 77.34, p < 0.001;
Fig.4). Finally, each local community included in this study incidentally protected an overall additional
mean upland area of 12,383 ha of
terra rme
(nonooded) forests by simply closing off those areas by
severing physical access through the oodplain area protected by CBC. This area was on average nearly
40-fold larger than the directly protected area. Combining all four zones of either direct or incidental
protection, each community in fact protected a mean total area of oodplain and upland forest nearly 86
times larger than the total dry-season area of lakes sustaining local arapaima populations.
Table 1
Spatial scales, total areas, and total costs of territorial protection carried out by local communities
engaged in arapaima (A
rapaima gigas
) co-management sheries along the Juruá River, western Brazilian
Amazon.
Spatial scale
of protection
Total area (ha) Protection ratio1Mean area (ha)
per community
Total cost
(US$ ha‒1 yr‒1)
Direct area 4,263 1.0 305 0.95²
Effective area 32,844 7.7 2,346 0.95
Functional area 156,645 36.7 11,189 0.19
Incidental area 173,359 40.7 12,383 0.18
All scales of protection 367,111 85.1 26,223 -
¹ Protected area ratio between any given spatial scale and the scale of direct protection of oxbow
lakes under the jurisdiction of any given community, where
Arapaima
management activities actually
take place.
² The cost of either direct or effective protection are the same, given that local communities conduct
broader surveillance protecting areas beyond the immediate scale of direct protection of oxbow lakes.
2.3. Financial cost of CBC protection
The current community-scale monetary costs of environmental surveillance were calculated based on
real-world expenditure information reported by each community. The mean annual cost of territorial
surveillance was estimated at ~ US$31,271 to ensure the overall effective protection of 32,844 ha of
oodplain environments. In other words, ~US$0.95 was spent on each hectare of effectively protected
area. Surveillance expenditure was conservatively estimated at zero labour costs and based on only fuel
and food supplies consumed by lake guards who volunteered to contribute unpaid labour time. These
costs are low compared to the estimated community-led costs on the basis of our three potential
hypothetical PES scenarios. We found that if two lake guards were to be rewarded by local daily wages,
these costs would increase to US$5.30/ha. Assuming that labour costs for two guards could be met on
the basis of the Brazilian minimum wage, these costs would slightly increase to US$5.40/ha. Finally,
considering standard payment rates recently awarded by the ocial environmental protection agency
(ICMBio), these costs would further increase to US$9.60/ha (Fig.5).
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On average, surveillance costs represented 32% of the overall costs of community-based sheries
management and exerted a negative impact of 21% of the net community income. Protection costs
increased with both the authorized arapaima harvest quota (β = 46.84, p = 0.005, Fig.6a) and the extent
of travel distance to the farthest lake, which were typically far isolated from the river channel (β = 4.03, p
= 0.007, Fig.6b). Given the covariance structure we used, our model selection procedure included 10
possible models, but only one of those was selected as the most parsimonious model (ΔAIC = 0, ωAICc =
0.54, pseudo-R² = 0.62).
To ensure a fair reward system to local shers who protect wide-ranging sheries resources that
transcend local jurisdictions, we identied three potential scenarios according to the payment system
complying with Brazilian labour regulations. The cost of any PES program was calculated considering
the shing quota allowed by the regulatory agency, so that PES costs could be equated to a standard unit
of sh offtake (kg of harvested sh). This facilitates the payment rationale to local shers, in addition to
the fact that large quotas translate into more intensive efforts to protect supporting habitats. In these
terms, local payments would range from US$0.94/kg of sh considering local wages to US$1.70/kg of
sh considering ICMBio hiring standards. Considering labour costs in terms of the current minimum
salary accordingly to Brazilian labour law, cost estimates would be comparable to those considering local
daily wages (US$0.95/kg). These cost estimates mean that ensuring the viability of a PES program
covering the entire central Juruá River basin would require funding in the order of between ~
US$1,770,000 and ~ US$3,170,000 each year. If we were to project those values to support CB sheries
management across the entire state of Amazonas, this would require between ~ US$50.3million and ~
US$90.1million in annual payments, which would benet over 400 rural communities and ensure the
protection of approximately 15million hectares of oodplain forests.
3. Discussion
The territorial protection and resource surveillance carried out by Amazonian local communities involved
in arapaima co-management has ensured the protection of vast areas of tropical forest, safeguarding the
ow of multiple ecosystem services at different scales (Campos-Silva and Peres, 2016). Our results
provide further strong evidence that the protection of aquatic environments within community-based
sheries arrangements ensure the protection of much larger intact aquatic and terrestrial areas compared
to only the aggregate lake area alone where dry-season shing activities are conducted. Local
communities are always present and protect their harvestable aquatic environments all year-round and
around the clock, although commercially valuable sh stocks become more vulnerable during the
prolonged annual ood pulse, when communal protection efforts become more diffuse across the vast
oodwaters. However, surveillance demands enormous dedication of time and effort, in addition to
incurring a high cost to the low-income families involved, by limiting their capacity to engage in other
protable activities and subsistence food production. In this context, community-led territorial governance
and protection represents a substantial opportunity cost for local households. It is therefore critical to
recognize, and ideally enhance, communal surveillance activities through nancial support of local
communities if the long-term success of this CBC program is to be maintained (Franco et al., 2021).
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Spatial extent of community-based protection
Most arapaima population assessments consider lakes as the spatial unit of sheries management
(Campos-Silva and Peres, 2016; Castello et al., 2009). However, our results show that the effective
protection by resident communities, considering their routine surveillance routes on foot, are almost eight
times larger than the actual aggregate lake area, and this extended protection footprint in fact becomes
much larger, considering that guarding oodplain environments during the critical time of the year
incidentally precludes access to adjacent upland forests that could be reached otherwise. Therefore, by
avoiding illegal incursions by outside users into the oodplain and its anastomosing channels, local
communities are also ensuring the added-value protection of vast areas of unooded upland forests. In
this context, beyond the strong positive impact on sheries resources and aquatic biodiversity, as shown
elsewhere (Campos-Silva and Peres, 2016; Campos-Silva et al. 2019), the effective protection of both
várzea
and
terra rme
forests during the low-water season clearly brings about strong additional benets
to terrestrial biodiversity conservation by preventing illegal exploitation by shers, hunters, loggers and,
more recently, miners.
Another key nding reported here is the spatial extent of functional protection, which is an important
hidden positive impact of community-based conservation. The Juruá River experiences a ood pulse that
can reach depths of up to 11 m for up to 230 days a year (Junk et al., 2011). Arapaima sh exhibit lateral
migration patterns during this prolonged ood pulse, including habitual movements into ooded forests
between tributary lakes and perennial streams, and the main river channel (Campos-Silva et al., 2019).
Population recovery of this apex predator is closely associated with lateral migration and replenishing of
depleted environments (Campos-Silva et al. 2019), which can impact the top-down trophic dynamics
across an area ~ 255-fold larger than the neighbouring lake area, thereby controlling the abundance of
other important prey species (Campos-Silva et al., 2021). In addition, the spatial contagion of enforcing
protection ensures recolonization of previously depleted areas far away from the target lake, reinforcing
the importance of co-management activities in promoting food security for Amazonian rural communities
(Darimont et al., 2015; Tregidgo et al., 2020).
Cost of community-based protection in a seasonal environment
Arapaima population viability is closely linked to the hydrological cycle, including the supra-annually
variable seasonal ood pulse, which markedly alters the seasonal uvial connectivity of the oodplains
along major meandering rivers of the Amazon (Junk et al., 1989). At this time of year, arapaima move
between lakes, the main river channel, and the ooded forest, where they gain access to high-quality food
sources. When oodwaters begin to recede, arapaima shows a high degree of site delity, returning to
their breeding lakes, particularly when conditions are quiet including low ambient noise (Campos-Silva et
al., 2019). This therefore demands a much greater community effort during this period to protect stocks
against human disruptions induced by shing gear and poaching (Fig.3). This leads to a marked peak of
labour-intensive surveillance activity that requires substantial resources, including food supplies, fuel,
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boats and canoes, and a larger number of volunteers because groups of arapaima can ee the lakes
prematurely if they perceive a threat from outside shers.
Lake surveillance costs increased with proximity to urban areas, particularly for those lakes containing
high densities of arapaima. This is expected because lakes exposed to greater subsistence and
commercial exploitation pressure — which is linked to high human population densities near urban
centers, where illegal offtakes are more frequent (Silvano, 2014; Abrahams et al., 2017) — require higher
territorial protection engagement and costs. In addition, considering the high-value of arapaima,
productive lakes containing large stocks are often well known and more vulnerable to external
exploitation, (Campos-Silva and Peres, 2016), and are therefore more intensively targeted by illegal shers
and poachers.
Comparing the costs of community-led efforts against alternative scenarios that rely on proactive
participation of government agencies or NGOs, we easily reach the conclusion that local community
inclusion in conservation arrangements is the cheapest and most cost-effective mechanism to ensure the
protection of natural ecosystems, such as the Juruá oodplains. However, we emphasise the glaring lack
of social justice behind this strategy given the heavy burden and local opportunity costs considering that
the time and effort spent in territorial protection could be allocated to alternative income generation
activities. In fact, the substantial asymmetry between large conservation benets accrued at multiple
scales and the local socioeconomic costs incurred locally represents one of the main bottlenecks in
implementing community-based arrangements. This distortion thus needs to be addressed to strengthen
the CBC model in Amazonia and beyond.
Although the costs of community-led protection can be seen as exceedingly low compared to the typical
investments on conservation interventions made by most external agencies (Silva et al., 2019), those
values are extremely high for disenfranchised local communities, which accept to soldier on because this
heavy burden yields many other benets beyond a simple monetary tradeoff (Campos-Silva et al., 2021).
Our study communities have legitimized their interests through co-management actions, increasingly
engaging in conservation practices with intrinsic motivations that are often above economic payoffs. In
addition to collective decision-making, there is a collective sense of autonomy and belonging that
ensures access to natural resources for both present and future generations (Gamarra et al., 2022;
Ostrom, 2009). Given little or no action enacted by toothless environmental agencies throughout the
Amazon, this local community empowerment has lled the vacuum by successfully protecting their own
territories against major threats by external enterprises waging predatory overexploitation (Levis et al.,
2020; Lopes et al., 2021).
Strengthening recognition of hidden environmental services
Community-led biodiversity protection thorough local empowerment can ensure socio-environmental
governance and maintenance of ecosystem services and opportunities for self-development both inside
and outside protected areas (Campos-Silva et al. 2022), especially when confronting hostile policies in
which the main environmental regulations have been dismantled (Vale et al., 2021). However, local
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communities cannot continue to shoulder the heavy burden of 24-by-7 environmental protection without
external support. This is vital for the maintenance of community-based conservation, given that
biodiversity-based value chains are not suciently fair to cover the intrinsic costs of environmental
protection. In addition, above and beyond the nancial costs associated with surveillance efforts, there
are other secondary opportunity costs incurred by neglecting horticultural investments, which also
provide subsistence and income (Alves-Pinto et al., 2018; Newton et al., 2012). Furthermore, a relentless
state of surveillance and readiness imposes a substantial physical and psychological toll, with the ever-
present possibility of violent hostilities with potential intruders, which in extreme cases can be life-
threatening.
Payments for Ecosystem (or environmental) services (PES) has the potential to contribute highly positive
conditional incentives for the provision of ecosystem services. Although this approach is more common
in terrestrial conservation, it has recently grown in sheries management. In sum, PES is more likely to
succeed within sheries arrangements that show (i) demand for one or a set of ecosystem services or
bottlenecks in the value-chain; (ii) evidence-based approach with a clear baseline; (iii) clear boundaries
and property rights; (iv) strong local governance; (v) robust monitoring, control and surveillance; and (vi)
nancial sustainability (Bladon et al., 2016). Arapaima co-management in the Brazilian Amazon shows a
high level of community organization, in addition to the balanced participation of local institutions, NGOs,
academic institutions, and government agencies. These conditions provide a solid foundation for the
implementation, organization, and development of PES programs involving established CBC
arrangements. This is critical because the lack of socio-political organization often makes these schemes
unworkable (Salzman et al., 2018).
Our study clearly underscores an imperative moral challenge of directly compensating local communities
for a wider public good generated by their environmental protection efforts (Arantes et al., 2022). A fairer
return on their conservation efforts is vital to compensate for their tangible contributions and roles as
protagonists of these arrangements, aligning biodiversity protection with local wellbeing. As such,
strengthening and ensuring better surveillance conditions and greater economic returns to local
communities can capture the long-term goals of local environmental and socioeconomic sustainability. A
co-designed PES model should be conceived transparently in terms of who pays (the buyers), who
benets (the beneciaries), and who sells (the providers) (Hallwass et al., 2013). We advocate that a PES
mechanism within the arapaima CBM program in Brazil should be supported multilaterally between inter-
governmental funds, non-governmental initiatives, and international cooperation, considering that the
ecosystem services indirectly provided by local communities operate at a global scale (Levis ate al.
2020). The Brazilian government has the means to implement a PES program, which could become a key
nancial mechanism, strengthening the economic benets of environmental protection, promoting an
increased sense of ownership, and engaging new communities in arapaima management, similarly to
other PES programs like the Bolsa Floresta (Cisneros et al., 2022).
Payments for Ecosystem Service programs have raised signicant ethical and social concerns. If natural
resources are considered a commodity, susceptible to monetary or non-monetary transactions, this could
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exacerbate inequalities in the distribution of benets, potentially disadvantaging the communities
involved (Kaiser et al., 2021). For initiatives to be effective, equity in the distribution of PES benets must
be part of the entire workow of activities.
Neglecting the interconnected aspects of socio-biodiversity can undermine the effectiveness of
conserving natural environments. Focusing exclusively on measurable environmental services and
simplifying ecological processes can often undervalue natural resources with simplistic and direct values
(Shapiro-Garza et al., 2020; Upton, 2020). One solution is a comprehensive and detailed resource
assessment, avoiding the exclusion of critical operational factors for PES development and maintenance
(Kaiser et al., 2021).
By beneting from PES, communities can paradoxically become dependent and vulnerable if there are no
strategies to mitigate nancial and structural risks that ensure the continuity of activities (Upton, 2020).
To this end, diversifying funding sources reduces the risks associated with possible interruptions or lags
in payments and/or benets (Kaiser et al., 2021). In this way, community-based surveillance systems can
be ensured in the long term, as well as become established as a fair activity (Shapiro-Garza et al., 2020).
Community participation is a crucial element in the processes of designing, implementing, and
monitoring the effectiveness and success of PES activities (Kaiser et al., 2021; Ostrom, 2010). In addition,
this must be based on transparency among investors, beneciaries, and providers (Shapiro-Garza et al.,
2020; Upton, 2020). Thus, the active participation of community members, together with inter-institutional
partnerships, can render bureaucratic and legal processes enforceable in a participatory manner (Shapiro-
Garza et al., 2020). Our results showcase a highly feasible and remarkably inexpensive model in which
territorial protection across vast tracts of Amazonian forests can be ensured by relatively modest
nancial investments that would strengthen frontline conservation.
4. Conclusion
Arapaima management in Brazilian Amazonia has emerged as a promising window of opportunity to
align community-based conservation of natural ecosystems with sustainable and equitable prosperity.
This is all the more remarkable considering the sheer isolation of many local communities that often lack
access to public services but in practice deliver
de facto
effective resource governance. However, any
socioeconomic gains accrued from sustainable offtakes are still very modest considering the huge
positive impact on biodiversity conservation (Campo-Silva and Peres, 2016; Campos-Silva et al. 2019,
2020, 2021). Our results now uncover the hidden added-value of community-based territorial surveillance,
which ensures both biodiversity protection and the provision of a wide range of ecosystem services that,
in turn, enhances the quality of life of local people. It is noteworthy that arapaima co-management
actions, which has ensured food security and an annual cash windfall while protecting otherwise
accessible oodplains result in cascading effects for conservation at different spatial scales. In this
context, there is a dire need to both recognize and reward the enormous effort allocated by local
communities to protect Amazonian natural ecosystems. It is thus imperative to consolidate a new
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pathway towards a brighter future for Amazonia, where the livelihoods of oodplain dwellers and
protection of Earth’s largest tropical forest are inextricably linked.
5. Methods
5.1 Study Area
This study was conducted along the Juruá River, a major tributary of the Solimões (= Amazon) River, and
primarily within the ~ 2.58-million-hectare municipal county of Carauari (4° 52′ 58″ S, 66° 53′ 45″ W) in the
State of Amazonas, Brazil. This region is strongly inuenced by commercial and subsistence activities
involving shing, agriculture, and
Euterpe
(açaí) fruit and oilseed extraction (Newton et al., 2012). This
region contains two contiguous sustainable-use protected areas: the 632,949-ha Uacari Sustainable
Development Reserve (RDS Uacari, 5º43'58"S, 67º46'53"W), and the 253,227 ha Extractive Reserve Médio
Juruá (ResEx Médio Juruá, 5º33'54"S, 67º42'47"W). These reserves were decreed in 1997 and 2005,
respectively, and currently contain ~ 4,000 inhabitants distributed across 74 communities, most of which
near the river channel, along a uvial distance of 800 km, in addition to communities located along the
banks of oxbow lakes and perennial streams (Fig.3).
5.2 Resource governance resulting from arapaima co-
management
To ensure both economic and food security for rural communities, Fishing Accords (i.e. formal
agreements) were widely negotiated in the mid-Juruá region during the 2010s. These accords involved
local communities, including those outside protected areas, as well as the Fishers Cooperative of
Carauari, the nearest urban centre. The agreements created three different categories of access to lake
resources during the dry season, when lakes become clearly discrete geographic features where sh
concentrate: (1)
Subsistence-use lakes
, which are intended to supply local subsistence needs, and which
are restricted to artisanal shers from the resident community who are responsible for guarding that lake;
(2)
Protected lakes
, which are managed by local communities primarily as arapaima stock recovery sites,
and exclude both commercial and subsistence shing boats, except for a brief community-led offtake
season based on a strict harvest quota predetermined by IBAMA, the Brazilian Natural Resources Agency
(Campos-Silva et. al., 2016); and (3)
Production lakes
, which are open-access to both commercial and
subsistence shers.
A oating wooden watchtower is typically erected at the main strategic entrance of the lake. Equipped
with makeshift hunting gear and subsistence supplies, these stationary posts, which are occupied by a
small patrol unit and managed by the resident community, conduct round-the-clock armed surveillance.
During the arapaima management season, some of the protected lakes are harvested by the resident
community for a brief period of up to 5 days per year, according to a previously determined proportional
harvest quota based on a stock assessment dened as the number of adult and juvenile arapaima
counted at that lake in the previous year (see Campos-Silva and Peres, 2016).
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Annual arapaima counts began at several lakes along the mid-Juruá in 2005, and lake management was
implemented in 2010 by a partnership between local communities, local associations, and federal and
state agencies. Arapaima counts take place during the low-water season at each monitored lake each
year, and the census data are forwarded to IBAMA. IBAMA then authorizes a lake-specic harvest quota
of up to 30% of all adults (> 1.5m in length) counted, depending on the sh processing requirements of
the resident community and other extenuating factors.
5.3 Data analysis
5.3.1 Quantifying territorial protection
We conducted participatory community mapping through semi-structured interviews (CAAE research
ethics permit 52148721.6.0000.5013) with lake guards, community leaders, and community residents.
First, we asked general questions to describe the surveillance dynamics, including the main actors,
surveillance alternation dynamics, impact of seasonality on surveillance dynamics, surveillance
pathways, conict resolution strategies, and associated costs. Participatory community mapping
occurred interactively using A3-sized hardcopy cartographic maps showing LANDSAT-8 satellite images
in RGB (5,4,3) colour composition, with a scale of 1:100,000 for location and identication of each lake
where territorial surveillance had been deployed by each community. Each lake management category
was identied by outlining locations on the map using colour markers (Wartmann and Purves, 2017).
Participatory community mapping was carried out with community residents who had extensive previous
experience with both spatial landmarks across the waterscape, which is the main form of transport in this
region, the overall landscape, and in-depth knowledge of arapaima co-management activities. Floodplain
mapping was carried out within the scope of either community meetings or visits to resident households.
Arapaima co-management activities exert varying impacts at different spatial scales of inuence (Fig.3).
First, there is a (1)
direct scale of protection
, represented by the immediate lake area where actual
surveillance takes place. Second, there is an (2)
effective scale of protection
, which is represented by the
total area within the community surveillance boundaries. Third, there is a (3)
functional scale of
protection
, represented by the functional impact zone exerted by spatial exclusion, particularly related to
the vagrancy and movement capacity of the target species protected at each lake. Finally, there is an (4)
incidental scale of protection
at which local communities indirectly protect large portions of upland (
terra
rme
) forests farther inland by simply restricting entry to strategic access points within the more
accessible adjacent oodplains.
Direct scale of protection
During the mapping sessions, all lakes protected through surveillance that are managed by any given
community were identied and further classed as direct surveillance areas, as they are the focus of
management activities, and their total area was measured using the MapBiomas Água Project collection
1 dataset (MapBiomas 2021), which mapped all open water bodies across Brazil.
Page 14/26
Effective scale of protection
Territorial surveillance for lake protection is a set of actions and adaptive strategies that occur on a full-
time basis, but intensied in the dry season, to protect areas of management interest. These areas
include subsistence-use, protected, and production lakes that are harvested for local subsistence.
Surveillance aims to protect lakes from illegal harvesting by either local or external shers, and any other
exploitation activities that can disturb the lake and the surrounding forest, such as hunting and timber
extraction. Surveillance strategies are continuously adapted according to the needs of each community
and depend on the number of managed lakes, number of people available for surveillance, landscape
context, and geographic accessibility of each lake.
Surveillance is conducted by travelling around the perimeter of each lake by canoe or on foot, depending
on the season, searching for any presence or signs of intruders. In several communities, oating wooden
houses are placed at strategic entry points of access to lakes to optimize surveillance. During
surveillance, lake guards cover a oodplain area much larger than the size of individual lakes, which we
refer to as “effective scale of protection”, where illegal activities, including poaching, shing, and logging,
are excluded. To estimate the effective protection of each lake, we combined GPS tracks and spatial data
recovered from interviews to map the daily paths that community guards frequently travelled to protect
each lake. The area effectively protected, including seasonally-ooded
várzea
forest and open-water
bodies, was estimated, including all reported paths on foot and/or canoes between lakes, and all strategic
surveillance points that were frequently accessed by outside users attempting illegal shing. Polygons
drawn during participatory mapping were reproduced in QGIS 3.14 at the same scale using the
corresponding satellite image to ne-tune estimates of the effective scale of protection.
Functional scale of protection
We also estimated the functional protection area of each lake based on the movement capacity of giant
arapaima (
Arapaima gigas
), the conservation target species in this arrangement. We therefore considered
arapaima movement patterns, which had been quantied during a previous telemetry study (Campos-
Silva et al. 2019), to estimate the capacity of each lake to function as a source area of individuals
moving into depleted lakes and the spatial conguration of landscape-scale population gene ow, both of
which can sustain ecological interactions and top-down control of food webs mediated by an apex
predator such as the arapaima (Campos Silva et al. 2021).
This was estimated using a 1,730-m buffer area around the dry-season perimeter of each lake (i.e. the
direct scale of protection). This threshold value corresponds to the radius of an average circular
Arapaima home range area, dened by the Minimum Convex Polygon formed by positional xes obtained
for 13 juveniles and adults. Six of these individuals were tracked in our study area in 2014 and seven in
2015 using conventional VHF telemetry, amounting to 309 locations, 125 and 184 of which during the dry
and wet seasons, respectively.
Incidental scale protection
Page 15/26
In addition to these three scales of protection, oxbow lake surveillance also incidentally protects all the
rear areas of upland forests by closing off the physical accessibility to unauthorized users of the
várzea
oodplain. This strategy prevents non-resident loggers, hunters, and shers from accessing upland areas,
typically to stealthily exploit natural resources without the explicit consent of the local community. This
scale of protection was estimated by multiplying the total width of
várzea
oodplains protected at the
effective scale by a conservative 10-km length of upland forests that could be potentially affected by
illegal extractive activities. To assess differences in spatial extent between different scales of protection,
an Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) was performed with the response variable on a logarithmic scale.
Assumptions of normality of residuals and homogeneity of variances were evaluated using the Shapiro-
Wilk and Levene tests, respectively.
5.3.2 Assessing protection dynamics and costs
To better understand local surveillance priorities according to the ood pulse dynamics, we organized
focal group interviews at each community with 45 experienced shers who had conducted local lake
surveillance for at least 15 years. These focal groups were adept at mapping the seasonality of
surveillance because of previous experience and uctuations in water level change the accessibility of
water-bodies and their vulnerability. Surveillance costs were acquired during interviews and encompassed
general operational expenditure including fuel, food, and butane gas used as fuel to power outboard
motors during surveillance routes, according to the unique ways in which each community carried them
out. This excludes labour input and expenditure related to purchase and maintenance of wooden or
aluminium boats, outboard motors, paddles, and infrastructure such as strategically positioned oating
houses, which served to accommodate lake guards during surveillance shifts. To supplement our eld
data, we assessed the annual reports of arapaima management sheries provided by the Association of
Rural Producers from Carauari (ASPROC) produced in 2022. ASPROC is a grassroots smallholder and
sher-led organization leading the arapaima management along the Juruá River. We computed the
surveillance expenses associated with all four scales of surveillance and subsequently compared costs
under three different scenarios: 1) current expenditure covered by local communities or guards who were
community members lacking any labour wage payments, 2) general expenditure and costs considering
local daily wages of US$14.30 for two people working all year-round; 3) costs incurred by hiring two
individuals receiving a minimum wage of US$442.24 (US$247.30 in wages plus US$194.90 in labour
taxes) to conduct surveillance in compliance with Brazilian labour regulations, and 4) potential
expenditure of US$852 (US$510.20 in wages plus US$341.80 in taxes) covered by the Brazilian
Environmental Agency for two additional environmental agents, according to the hiring notice SEI/ICMBio
15343964 and law 7.957/1989.
We also performed Generalized Linear Models (GLM) using a negative binomial distribution for
overdispersed count data (Hilbe, 2011) to investigate the community-scale variation in protection costs
(response variable) as a function of distance to the nearest town, number of lakes requiring protection,
distance to the farthest lake, and the locally authorized harvest quota. We controlled for high levels of
variable inter-dependence by performing a Pearson correlation matrix, retaining uncorrelated variables |r <
Page 16/26
0:70|. We mitigated for collinearity between predictors using the Variance Ination Factor (VIF < 3),
excluding variables above this threshold. We further combined all possible models, from the constant to
the full model, using the
dredge
function of the
MuMIn
package. Models were selected based on the
lowest Akaike information criterion (AIC) corrected for small sample sizes (AICc). The ΔAICc value
represents the difference between the AICc of a given model and the lowest AICc, whereas ΔAICc < 2
represent the most likely set of parsimonious models (Burnham & Anderson 2002). Model coecient
estimates and condence intervals were calculated by performing 1,000 bootstrap samples with
replacements using the
rsample
R package (Frick et al. 2023). All monetary costs were standardized and
corrected for ination from October 2021 to July 2023 and converted into USD using a 4.91 BRL
exchange rate.
Finally, we estimated the nancial imperative of covering the overall costs of territorial protection through
a PES mechanism. We built three different scenarios considering fuel and food requirements and, at
least, two people hired through different potential mechanisms: daily wages, minimum wages following
Brazilian labour regulations and reecting the standard pattern followed by the Instituto Chico Mendes de
Conservação da Biodiversidade (ICMBio), the environmental agency responsible for Protected Areas and
environmental management in Brazil. We also divided this value by the potential sh catch of each
community to calculate the value of expenditures per unit biomass of harvested sh, which could
facilitate the rational implementation of a PES program based on territorial protection and ocial catch
statistics.
Declarations
Acknowledgments:
The completion of this work was made possible through the nancial support Fundo Brasileiro para a
Biodiversidade (FUNBIO) and Instituto Humanize (Project No. 021/2021), which played a crucial role in
facilitating and advancing this study. We would like to acknowledge the Coordenação de
Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (Capes) for providing doctoral scholarship to ACR (Grant
No. 88887.505812/2020-00). Additionally, Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Cientíco e
Tecnológico (CNPq) awarded a echange scholarship (Grant No. 200625/2022-5) to ACR at Indiana
University. Our sincere thanks go to the Secretaria do Estado do Meio Ambiente e Desenvolvimento
Sustentável do Amazonas (SEMA, DEMUC) and the Instituto Brasileiro do Meio Ambiente e Recursos
Naturais Renováveis (ICMBio) for granting the necessary permissions and authorizations for conducting
the research. We also extend our heartfelt appreciation to the Associação dos Produtores Rurais de
Carauari, Associação dos Moradores da Reserva de Desenvolvimento Sustentável Uacari, and all the
local communities in the Médio Juruá region. Their collaboration, insights, and support were instrumental
in the successful execution of this project.
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Figures
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Figure 1
Territorial protection and surveillance of Amazonian oodplains organized in pairs or small teams within
the scope of arapaima sheries management. Protection extends far beyond oxbow lakes, covering
substantially larger areas. Arapaima co-management activities have varying impacts at different spatial
scales (1) Direct scale of protection: immediate lake areas under surveillance; (2) Effective scale of
protection: full-time territorial surveillance, intensied during the dry season, protecting areas of
management interest; (3) Functional scale of protection: estimated based on the movement ecology of
arapaima , considering their ability to sustain ecological interactions; and (4) Incidental scale of
protection: indirect surveillance of adjacent upland forest areas that are incidentally protected by
restricting access to the oodplain by outside users.
Page 22/26
Figure 2
The Juruá River ood pulse over the last 38 years and community-based surveillance efforts. Community
surveillance efforts intensify during the period of receding oodwaters in which sh stocks become more
concentrated and more vulnerable.
Page 23/26
Figure 3
Mid-section of the Juruá River, western Brazilian Amazonia. Orange circles represent 14 communities
located within two contiguous sustainable-use forest reserves, with a combined area of 886,176 ha.
These communities perform territorial surveillance for co-management of arapaima (
Arapaima gigas
)
within 96 lakes here represented by blue dots. Inset map shows (i) the effective scale of protection (in
yellow) which included to the routes that community rangers patrol to protect lakes, and (ii) the scale of
functional protection (shaded in orange), in which arapaima stocks are fully protected to move into
oodplains during the high-water season. Finally, the larger (iii) scale of incidental protection (shaded in
grey) represents the adjacent upland (
terra rme
) forests that are also closed off by restricting access by
outsiders to oodplain forests.
Page 24/26
Figure 4
Boxplots representing the area (log10 x) and different spatial scales of protection carried out by
Amazonian rural communities engaged in Arapaima (
Arapaima
gigas
) co-management along the Juruá
River, western Brazilian Amazonia.
Page 25/26
Figure 5
Boxplot illustrating protection costs incurred by local communities participating in sustainable Arapaima
sheries co-management, and alternative estimated costs under two scenarios: (i) assuming that two
lake guards in each community are employed for territorial surveillance receiving a minimum wage
according to Brazilian labour regulations; and (ii) two environmental agents are hired and deployed by a
government agency.
Page 26/26
Figure 6
Community-based territorial protection costs as a function of (a) the authorized Arapaima harvest quota
(log10 x) and (b) the distance to the farthest lake from the Juruá River channel.
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