Indigenous communities in the Amazon are mapping their own territories and documenting little-known plant and animal species alongside Western scientists, combining centuries of local knowledge with modern biological surveys. The project tackles a blind spot in conservation science: most biodiversity research in the Amazon ignores the deep history of human management of forests, soils, and species. Indigenous peoples have shaped these ecosystems for millennia, yet their knowledge is rarely integrated into formal species inventories or climate models. Without that integration, both conservation strategies and climate projections miss critical data. If successful, the project will produce the first large-scale, cross-regional analyses that link Indigenous ethnobiological knowledge with genetic, taxonomic, and remote-sensing data across three territories. This could reshape how international climate and biodiversity programmes account for human-managed landscapes, and provide Indigenous communities with documented evidence of their environmental stewardship. The work is primarily fundamental science—deepening understanding of sociobiodiversity—but similar collaborations have previously uncovered new crop varieties and soil management techniques that later informed sustainable agriculture and reforestation programmes.
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The Voices of Indigenous Amazonia project proposes to study Amazonian biodiversity and its long-term interactions with Indigenous peoples in three regions characterized by complex sociocultural systems: the Upper Negro Indigenous Territory (Amazonas state); the Xingu Indigenous Territory (Matto Grosso state); and the Kayapó Indigenous Territory (Pará state). These territories stand out for their varied and complex ethnic, historical, and socio-environmental configurations, which include ethnobiological knowledge that is specific to each region. In this project we propose to combine human and biological sciences with Indigenous knowledge to increase our efficiency in producing knowledge about Amazonia. We propose to document biodiversity and its relationship with knowledge and sociocultural practices of present and past Indigenous peoples through: 1) biological inventories of species little known to Western science; 2) characterizing Indigenous landscapes through participatory mapping and remote sensing; 3) fostering exchanges of biodiversity-related knowledge between scientific and Indigenous knowledge; 4) recording long-term anthropogenic changes in vegetation, fauna, and soils ; and 5) collaboratively producing relevant ethnographic, linguistic, and sociocultural documentation. Supported by multifaceted biological studies (descriptions of new species, taxonomic revisions, morphological and molecular phylogenetic analyses, distribution modelling and species richness) integrated with studies of traditional Indigenous knowledge, including its role in the domestication of plants and landscapes, as well as studies of millennia-old environmental management technologies within different Indigenous territories, the project will enable large-scale analyses of biological and sociocultural diversity while mitigating existing taxonomic gaps in poorly sampled yet well-preserved regions of Brazilian Legal Amazonia. At a broader level, the project will produce relevant contributions to tackle the current climate emergency and socio-environmental challenges of the Anthropocene, which compromises forests, resources, and the continuity of the lifeways of our partners, Indigenous peoples of Amazonia.
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