Articles by Sibélia Zanon

“This is a good time. It’s when we used to wake up to cast our net on the river,” Adan Pereira says. “The hard part was to play odds and…

When she was 6 years old, Ludmila Pugliese de Siqueira moved with her family to the state of Amazonas in northeastern Brazil. Her father was a geologist and worked on…

On an island in the estuary known as Lagoa dos Patos, in Brazil’s Rio Grande do Sul state, an old lady kept a treasure in her fridge. For years, it…

The Atlantic Rainforest of the Northeast Project plans to reforest 70 hectares (173 acres) in the states of Pernambuco and Alagoas by 2023. Monitoring in Pernambuco’s Serra do Urubu region has shown an increase in bird diversity, from 105 species recorded in 2005, to 287 in 2021. Despite the progress being made, the situation remains fragile, with seven bird species having gone extinct in the Atlantic Forest in recent decades, and a strong tradition of keeping birds in cages still persisting.

Electrical engineer Cristiano de Mello Gallep was working in a biophotonics laboratory in the city of Limeira, in Brazil’s São Paulo state, trying to measure self-luminescence in organisms — the…

We set out from the town of Extrema, in Brazil’s Minas Gerais state, in a four-wheel-drive vehicle at 9 a.m. on a Monday. Driving beneath a mountainous vista and blue…

The canary in the coal mine for how climate change is affecting the treasure trove of biodiversity in the Amazon is … also a bird. Dozens of them, in fact,…

Diogo de Souza used to wake up at 3 a.m., stop by the house of a community member who knew about manatees, and the two began work among the carapanãs,…

“I believe that those who used to buy soursop juice will stop buying it,” says José Marcondes Puyanawa. “They will stop buying it because they have it in their own…

A study at the University of Zurich in Switzerland shows that a large proportion of existing medicinal plant knowledge is linked to threatened indigenous languages. In a regional study on the Amazon, New Guinea and North America, researchers concluded that 75% of medicinal plant uses are known in only one language.

Since it launched in December 2019, the RenovaBio program from Brazil’s energy ministry has been betting on increased use of biofuels to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In addition to establishing…

A study analyzed 56 extractive reserves in the Brazilian Amazon to assess how climate change will affect 18 of the main plant species collected from the rainforest.

About 14% of the Brazilian Amazon, an area the size of Spain and Portugal combined, falls under the category of non-designated public forests, or NDPFs. These are state or federally…

"My husband would go to the neighbor's barn two or three times a week to get pig manure. He'd throw it in the biodigester and we were able to cook…

For decades it was the only freshwater dolphin species in the world not considered threatened by human activity. The tucuxi of the Amazon held out even as similar species in…

After nearly giving up on their coffee plantations, farmers in Apuí, in Brazil’s Amazonas state, have turned to a different farming model. Through agroforestry, they have found they can both…

A mammal native to South America’s savannas, the maned wolf (Chrysocyon brachyurus) now lives in the Amazon Rainforest. That’s the finding of a recent study by researchers in the Brazilian…

Establishing economic value for the service of preserving native vegetation and creating a new source of income for rural producers. These are the objectives of Conserv, a private initiative launched…

Four clay panthers look at visitors through glass shields. The first two, black, are the guardians of memory. The ones at the back, on pedestals, are jaguars — but they…

One of the most devastating effects of the illegal trafficking of wild animals in Brazil is the proliferation of marmosets in large urban centers. There are two species in particular…

In recent months, meatpacking companies in different parts of the world have been associated with large clusters of COVID-19 infections. The Tönnies meat-processing plant in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, was temporarily…

For two years, regions of Brazil that depend on precipitation fed by Amazonian vegetation have seen rainfall below historical averages, impacting crops and harvests. A recent bulletin from a federal agency points to agribusiness itself as one of the drivers of this pattern.

In inland São Paulo state, 2.5 million Atlantic Forest trees were planted to enable the survival of one of the rarest primates on Earth.

Native Brazilian bees provide several environmental services – pollination of flora and agricultural crops being the most important one. But new studies show that pesticides may affect them more intensely.

From spiderweb-inspired shampoo to a hotel whose architecture is based on the thermal properties of toucan beaks, scientists and companies in Brazil are betting on nature’s intelligence to create innovative solutions that reduce impacts on the planet.

In seeking an alternative to the develop-or-conserve dichotomy that governs policymaking over the Amazon, Brazilian scientists have come up with the Amazonia Third Way, a plan to preserve the region’s biodiversity by supercharging sustainable forestry practices with technology.

A researcher at the INPE Center of Land System Science, Antonio Donato Nobre, describes the state of degradation threatening the future of the Amazon rainforest in an exclusive interview with Mongabay.