Management of Wildlife in the Floodplain: A Critical Look at Threats, Bottlenecks, and the Future in Amazonia

Abstract

The main bottlenecks for conservation and management of fauna in the Brazilian Amazonia have been the lack of scientists and of adequate legislation. The hunting of aquatic vertebrates such as turtles, crocodilians, and more recently, the pink river dolphin in the floodplain forest represents the most important illegal wildlife trade in the world. My objective in this chapter is to present a qualitative analysis of the main trends in the use and management of wildlife in the várzea floodplain forests of Amazonia, and the consequent evolution of related legislation. Considering all the Brazilian ecosystems’ conservation policies, wildlife was the component least discussed and for which legislation was not modified in the last 40 years. The proclamation of the National System of Conservation Units (SNUC; Law 9.985) in 2000 became the most important development for the direct use of wildlife in Amazonia, especially in the case of Extractive Reserves and Sustainable Development Reserves. Over the last decade, thousands of projects have claimed to identify themselves as examples of sustainable management in Amazonia. Until better procedures are implemented, regional authorities and environmental agencies should label as sustainable management only those planned human interventions which include some intrinsic compensatory mechanisms for the exploited animal populations, and which through these mechanisms guarantee the genetic variability of the populations. However, we cannot assume that protection efforts constitute effective sustainable management, unless the monitoring shows what the population trends are, and mechanisms exist to alert conservationists in case of unsustainable use. Over the next decades, public policies within Brazilian Amazonia related to the sustainable management of wildlife should include the following: a source-sink system, an adequate monitoring program, satisfactory community involvement, commercial trade focused initially on the Brazilian market and on the MERCOSUL region, supervision of the state government by the federal government and by NGOs, and all of these components monitored by the academic community. The management of crocodilians in the Brazilian várzea floodplain forests of Amazonia is self-defeating and a looming threat to what could have been one of the few and best empirical examples of sustainable wildlife use and management in the Amazon basin.