Anne Silva 
Biodiversity is how ecologists measure the health of an ecosystem, and the concept can be read in the field. Seven concrete signs any visitor can spot inside an Amazon conservation unit, from the harpy eagle to the tambaqui.
Locally extinct in Corrientes for more than seventy years, the jaguar is back in the Esteros del Iberá. The reintroduction aims to give Argentina’s largest wetland its self regulation back.
The yearly rise and fall of the Amazon River, known to ecologists as the flood pulse, decides where and when rare species such as the pink river dolphin, the giant otter and the Amazonian manatee feed, breed and migrate.
Capybaras have settled into the canals, squares and ponds of Amazonian cities. Behind the charming scene lies a conflict over space and a public health question urban planning has yet to answer.
Not the harpy eagle and not a vulture: a common half meter raptor swapped open grassland for rooftops and utility poles. In the city it found an unexpected prey, the snakes of vacant lots.
The Rubber Boom turned a small river outpost in the Amazon into a city with electric trams, imported opera and streets paved in rubber. This is the urban history of Manaus, from Belle Epoque splendour to the collapse of 1912.
In western Pará, deep in the Brazilian Amazon, the Tapajós River exposes strips of white quartz sand every dry season and swallows them again under as much as seven metres of water. The cycle feeds fish, flooded forests and a fragile tourism economy.
Igarape means canoe path in Tupi. The word reveals an Indigenous system that classified Amazonian watercourses by function, navigability and even natural chemistry.
Plants inherit a biological memory of drought and cold. Brazilian farming families are trying to inherit decades of intuition. Artificial intelligence can organise that record, but the knowledge still belongs to the people who built it on the land.
Owls, opossums and birds are shifting their body clocks and feeding habits to thrive among street lights and open rubbish bins. A practical guide to distance, hygiene and home adaptation, including the exact moment to call the environmental authorities.
