Search Results (7)

Anthropogenic pressures in the Amazon Basin are reshaping human–animal–environment interactions and increasing zoonotic disease risk. Within this One Health context, domestic dogs and cats are underrecognized contributors to pathogen circulation at the human–wildlife interface. We conducted a PRISMA-compliant systematic review of zoonotic pathogens reported in companion animals across Amazonian territories in nine countries, including literature published between 2000 and 2025 in four languages. Zoonotic pathogens showed a heterogeneous yet widespread distribution, with parasitic infections, particularly Leishmania spp., Toxoplasma gondii, and vector-borne protozoa, being the most frequently reported. A pronounced geographic bias was evident, with studies concentrated in Brazil and selected areas of the western Amazon, while large portions of the Basin remain understudied. Methodological limitations included reliance on cross-sectional designs and heterogeneous diagnostic approaches, often based solely on serology. These findings highlight the need to strengthen One Health-oriented governance frameworks that integrate animal health surveillance into environmental and public health policies. Priority actions include expanding surveillance to underrepresented regions, harmonizing diagnostic protocols, investing in regional laboratory capacity, and promoting community-based monitoring. Strengthened cross-sectoral and transboundary coordination is essential to reduce zoonotic risk and support evidence-based disease prevention in Amazonian ecosystems. Full article

Scientific collections are recognized as important instruments for research, conservation, and teaching of biodiversity; however, they remain underused as pedagogical resources for Education for Sustainable Development (ESD). The Ichthyological Collection of the Federal University of Western Pará (UFOPA), in western Pará, gathers representative specimens of Amazonian ichthyofauna, constituting a regional scientific and cultural heritage. This article describes the methodology for using technical–scientific data from this collection to produce four educational products about the diversity of fishes in the Tapajós River: a memory game, a coloring book, an illustrated species guide, and a school activity workbook. The research combined document review, interviews, data systematization, and translation into accessible language, integrating principles of ESD and science teaching. The results demonstrate that using the collection to produce educational materials, when based on contextualized methodologies, enhances scientific literacy for conservation. By translating scientific data into accessible pedagogical materials, this study provides practical support for environmental education policies and for the inclusion of local biodiversity content in school curricula, expanding the social reach of scientific collections and promoting direct impacts on conservation and sustainable development, thereby strengthening SDGs 4, 14, and 15. Full article

This paper offers paradigmatic insights from an international workshop on Ecological Legacies: Bridge Between Science and Community, in Ecuador, in the summer of 2023. The conference brought together foreign and local scholars, tour operators, village community, and Indigenous leaders in the upper Amazonia region of Ecuador with the goal of developing a vision for a sustainable and regenerative future of the upper Amazon. The conference offered three epistemological contributions to the existing literature in the emergent field of Montology, including addressing issues of (a) understanding the existing linguistic hegemony in describing tropical environments, (b) the redress of mistaken notions on pristine jungle environments, and (c) the inclusion of traditional knowledge and transdisciplinary approaches to understand the junglescape from different perspectives and scientific traditions. Methodologically, the conference bridged the fields of palaeoecological and ethnobotanical knowledge (as part of a wider conversation between science and local communities). Results show that local knowledge should be incorporated into the study of the junglescape and its conservation, with decolonial approaches for tourism, sharing language, methodology, tradition, and dissemination of the forest’s attributes. Our research helped co-create and formulate the “Coca Declaration” calling for a philosophical turn in research, bridging science and ethnotourism in ways that are local, emancipatory, and transdisciplinary. We conclude that facilitating new vocabulary by decolonial heightening of Indigenous perspectives of the junglescape helps to incorporate the notion of different Amazons, including the mountainscape of the Andean–Amazonian flanks. We also conclude that we can no consider Ecuador the country of “pure nature” since we helped demystify pristine nature for foreign tourists and highlighted local views with ancestral practices. Finally, we conclude that ethnotourism is a viable alternative to manage heritagization of the junglescape as a hybrid territory with the ecological legacies of the past and present inhabitants of upper Amazonia. Full article

In this communication, I focus on Shawi forms of address used in Peruvian State posters during the COVID-19 pandemic. The COVID-19 pandemic took a heavy toll on the Peruvian Indigenous population. A recent study showed that Indigenous people had 3.18 times the risk of infection and 0.4 times the mortality risk of the general population in Peru. The Shawi have not been included among the most heavily affected. A preliminary descriptive and critical account of Peruvian State posters whereby languages such as Shawi and other Peruvian Indigenous languages (Awajun, Ashaninka, different varieties of Quechua, Shipibo, etc.) have been used to prevent the spread of COVID-19 is provided. Shawi seems to be the only language of the sample where information has been framed using first-person inclusive forms. This appears to have led to enhanced communal engagement in the suggested health-related practices. Additionally, opinions on the issue from local stakeholders are briefly discussed. While the results are derived solely from preliminary observations, my findings could serve as a basis for enhancing health communication strategies in other Indigenous contexts, utilizing linguistically informed intercultural approaches. Full article

The present study explores intonational patterns in spontaneous speech in Peruvian Amazonian Spanish (PAS). The data came from 12 monolingual Spanish speakers in the city of Pucallpa, where the Spanish language has historically been in contact with the Amazonian language Shipibo-Konibo. The speakers responded to an open-ended prompt that elicited broad focus declaratives. Acoustic information from 1524 pitch accents was extracted from 194 sentences and analyzed using Praat. The analysis focused on five features: F0 rises, F0 peak alignment, downstepping, final lowering, and cases of stress clash. The results not only supported previous research on this variety that came from read speech tasks (e.g., F0 peaks consistently aligned with the stressed syllable), but also highlighted the importance of using multiple methodologies to gain a more comprehensive understanding of PAS prosody. Specifically, the varied sentence lengths and structures common in spontaneous speech provided new insights into downstepping, final lowering, and stress clash in PAS intonation. Overall, these results contribute to the growing literature on Spanish prosody in shared linguistic spaces and lend support for trends (such as F0 peak alignment) that have been reported in other language contact varieties. Full article

This paper examines switch reference (SR) in A’ingae, an understudied isolate language from Amazonian Ecuador. We present a theoretically informed survey of SR, identifying three distinct uses of switch reference: in clause chaining, adverbial clauses, and so-called ‘bridging’ clause linkage. We describe the syntactic and semantic properties of each use in detail, the first such description for A’ingae, showing that the three constructions differ in important ways. While leaving a full syntactic analysis to future work, we argue that these disparate properties preclude a syntactic account that unifies these three constructions to the exclusion of other environments without SR. Conversely, while a full semantic account is also left to future work, we suggest that a unified semantic account in terms of discourse coherence principles appears more promising. In particular, we propose that switch reference in A’ingae occurs in all and only the constructions that are semantically restricted to non-structuring coordinating coherence relations in the sense of Segmented Discourse Representation Theory. Full article

Behaviorally modern human beings have lived in Amazonia for thousands of years. Significant dynamics in species turnovers due to human-mediated disturbance were associated with the ultimate emergence and expansion of agrarian technologies in prehistory. Such disturbances initiated primary and secondary landscape transformations in various locales of the Amazon region. Diversity in these locales can be understood by accepting the initial premise of contingency, expressed as unprecedented human agency and human history. These effects can be accessed through the archaeological record and in the study of living languages. In addition, landscape transformation can be demonstrated in the study of traditional knowledge (TK). One way of elucidating TK distinctions between anthropic and nonanthropic landscapes concerns elicitation of differential labeling of these landscapes and more significantly, elicitation of the specific contents, such as trees, occurring in these landscapes. Freelisting is a method which can be used to distinguish the differential species compositions of landscapes resulting from human-mediated disturbance vs. those which do not evince records of human agency and history. The TK of the Ka’apor Indians of Amazonian Brazil as revealed in freelisting exercises shows differentiation of anthropogenic from high forests as well as a recognition of diversity in the anthropogenic forests. This suggests that the agents of human-mediated disturbance and landscape transformation in traditional Amazonia encode diversity and contingency into their TK, which encoding reflects past cultural influence on landscape and society over time. Full article