Climate Change in the Amazon Symposium

Nov 11, 2024 2 min read
Image credit: Fulbright Colombia

Our symposium on Climate Change in the Amazon took place from 12:30-5 pm on December 6, 2024 at the IACS Conference Room. This symposium brings together six Fulbright Amazonia scholars whose work spans disciplines in human and economic geography, policy, and remote sensing, all focused on climate change mitigation and adaptation in the Amazon. The symposium includes an Ask-Me-Anything lunch for students.

Explore more about the Fulbright Amazonia project

This Amazon-themed symposium will provide the SBU community with opportunities to engage with Fulbright Amazonia scholar during an Ask-Me-Anything (AMA) lunch and lab visits. At the AMA, students will hear about each Fulbright Amazonia scholar’s unique career trajectory both inside and outside academia. Such experiences provide a key opportunity to engage with undergraduate students who seek to make a difference through research.

Meet the Fulbright Amazonia Scholars

We are an integrative science team. Learn more about our areas of expertise and research interests!

Ane Alencar is the Science Director at Instituto de Pesquisa Ambiental da Amazonia (IPAM), a research based environmental Brazilian NGO that promotes sustainability, healthier environment and social justice in the Amazon. She graduated in Geography from the Federal University of Pará and holds a Master’s degree in Remote Sensing and Geographic Information Systems from Boston University, and a Ph.D. in Forest Resources and Conservation from the University of Florida. For the past three decades, she has been working at IPAM with the dynamics of deforestation, fire and forest degradation in relation to land use and climate change in the Amazon. She coordinates MapBiomas Fire, a comprehensive Brazil burned area monitoring initiative, as well as the Brazil Land Use Change Sector GHG estimate team of the Greenhouse Gas Emissions Estimation System (SEEG) initiative. She is one of the lead authors for the Scientific Panel for the Amazon and was recently listed as one of 14 female world leaders in the field of Machine Learning and Earth Observation by the Radiant Earth Foundation. As a Fulbright Amazonia Scholar, she will have the opportunity to integrate the knowledge of forest degradation by fire with other Pan Amazon countries in order to identify policy opportunities to reduce the impacts on Amazonian forest ecosystems.
Liliana M. Dávalos is Professor of Conservation Biology at Stony Brook University (New York). Her research explores how biodiversity changes in time and space, what biological processes fuel biodiversity, and what are the social factors of environmental degradation. Dávalos is a 2012 National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine Education Fellow in the Life Sciences and a 2013 Kavli Frontiers of Science Fellow for outstanding early career. She has advised the United Nations Office of Drug and Crime (UNODC) on deforestation in the Amazon-Andes since 2007, and is the author or coauthor of over 100 peer-reviewed journal articles, a coauthor of the 2016 and 2022 UNODC World Drug Reports and a co-editor of two volumes on zoology and environmental science, most recently, Phyllostomid Bats: A Unique Mammalian Radiation (University of Chicago Press, 2020). She serves as director of awards for the Society for Systematic Biologists, Associate Editor for the Society’s flagship journal, Systematic Biology, and Editor in Chief for the Quarterly Review of Biology. For her Fulbright Amazonia research, Dávalos aims to discover how coca production and, especially, drug trafficking contribute to deforestation and land-grabbing dynamics across the western Amazon. Through this work, she hopes to illuminate and help anticipate narco-trafficking as a cross-border, multi-scale market that contributes to environmental degradation and undermines human communities across the region.
Juan Pablo Iñamagua is a Lecturer at Ecuador’s Universidad de Cuenca, where he works with silvopastoral options for climate change mitigation and connectivity in livestock landscapes. His research focus is on understanding how agricultural landscapes contribute to ecosystem services provision, mainly to biodiversity and carbon sequestration. For this, he uses a participatory approach to identify native tree species of interest and later studies its ecology with the aim of including them in silvopastoral arrangements. He also studies the role of agricultural landscapes on wildlife presence. In his master and doctoral studies, he assessed direct greenhouse gas emissions on dairy farms in Costa Rica and the role of trees in livestock landscapes in the Coastal and Amazon region in Ecuador to account for farm negative emissions. His Fulbright Amazonia research will focus on silvopastoral options for climate change mitigation and how to improve the connectivity between livestock landscapes in the South of Ecuador’s Amazon region. The project aims to map and identify existing silvopastoral practices in the region, and to understand how local governments could support the adoption of these practices through local policies. The project will include different stakeholders and will explore their willingness to adopt silvopastoral practices, by communicating the possible impacts on climate change mitigation and connectivity.
Rayane Pacheco is an Associate Researcher at Centro de Inteligência Territorial (CIT), working with spatial data analysis for conservation law enforcement on rural properties. She is an environmental researcher and geospatial data scientist, with an undergraduate degree in environmental management from the Federal Institute of Education, Science and Technology of Pará (IFPA), a master’s degree in environmental systems analysis and modeling and a doctorate in production engineering from the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG). Pacheco has been working in the frontier of science and technology for the implementation of public policies in the Brazilian Amazon, in particular the Forest Code, the main forest conservation law in Brazil. Currently, she leads the development of methodological approaches for the territorial intelligence tool (CAR 2.0) that automatically assesses the Rural Environmental Registry (CAR) in the states of Pará and Minas Gerais, Brazil, an initiative of CIT in partnership with UFMG. Her Fulbright Amazonia research focuses on the spatial allocation of land for forest restoration to meet forest code requirements on private properties in the Brazilian Amazon.
Sabina Ribeiro is an associate professor at the Federal University of Acre. She graduated from the University of Brasília (UnB) and holds a Master’s and Doctorate in Forest management from Federal University of Viçosa (UFV). Her research has focused on the quantification of forest biomass and carbon stocks in the Atlantic forest, Cerrado (savannah) and Amazonia. She has also done applied research related to public policies concerning climate change. Ribeiro was PI on a 5-year NSF/USAID PEER “Forest Health Project” that included capacity building with extractive communities in Acre. Currently, Ribeiro is conducting research on forest dynamics in mature and secondary forests under the Prodigy project / Forest health consortium. She also leads the environmental work group of a project approved under the Amazonia+10 Initiative. Ribeiro’s Fulbright Amazonia project aims to disseminate scientific knowledge about climate change causes, adaptation and mitigation to traditional communities, mainly extractivists, as a way to foster sustainable development and reduce social inequalities in the state of Acre.
Galia Selaya is a Bolivian scientist with a Ph.D. in plant ecology and biodiversity. She is a researcher at the Forest Health Consortium-PRODIGY-BMBF project working with approaches to climate change in southwestern Amazonia through the lens of the theory of change. She focuses on anthropogenic drivers, wildfires, and climate change impacts on forests’ health and biodiversity functions in the tri-national region at the border of Bolivia (Pando), Peru (Madre de Dios), and Brazil (Acre). Previously, as a postdoc at the University of Florida, National Science Foundation project, she studied the synergetic dual economic and ecosystem services roles of species such as the Brazil nut tree (Bertholletia excelsa). Selaya conducts a multitemporal and multifactorial vegetation analysis from a network of permanent plots and remote sensing imagery. She works collaboratively with members of indigenous communities, forest dwellers, and stakeholders to monitor changes in forest carbon, productivity, and species resilience traits. She bridges participatory action research, scientific evidence, and citizen science for a diversified low-carbon emission economy and forest governance to address the anthropogenic and climate change threats to the Amazonian socio-ecological system. Her publication portfolio includes articles in ecology, society, and sustainability journals and multimedia outreach products for forest management and conservation.

Schedule

Time Speaker Topic
12:30 Fulbright Amazonia scholars & students AMA: Designing and completing an interdisciplinary project: Climate-related disasters in the Amazon
13:00 Fulbright Amazonia scholars & students Pizza Lunch
13:55 Lynch Opening remarks
14:00 Ribeiro Dissemination of scientific knowledge about climate change for extractivist communities in Acre, Brazil
14:20 Iñamagua Mitigating climate change through productive landscape design
14:40 Selaya Forest health at the Bolivia-Peru-Brazil triple border
15:00 Interactive panel: Q&A with speakers
15:15 Coffee Break
15:30 Alencar How vulnerable are Amazon protected areas?
15:50 Costa Options for forest restoration in Brazil
16:00 Dávalos Risks from criminal governance in the Amazon
16:30 Interactive panel: Q&A with speakers
16:45 Closing
Liliana M. Dávalos
Liliana M. Dávalos
Professor of Conservation Biology

I’m interested in biodiversity, both its past and its future.