Silvio Marchini

DPhil Thesis: Human Dimensions of the Conflicts between People and Jaguars on the Amazon Frontier, Brazil.

Background:
In 1994 I graduated from the University of São Paulo, Brazil, with a Bachelors degree in Biological Sciences. Ever since then, I have been working in the Amazon, initially as a research assistant at the Biological Dynamics of Forest Fragments Project, in Manaus, where I later conducted research on the effects of forest fragmentation on herbivory, as part of my Masters degree in Ecology at the University of Missouri-Saint Louis, in the United States. I also lived in Belem as the Academic Director of the Amazon Resource Management and Human Ecology Program of the School for Internation Training (SIT). The work for SIT inspired me to create the Amazonarium, an innovative educational organization whose mission is to promote and facilitate visits to the Brazilian Amazon through support to educational activities. The main branch of Amazonarium is the Escola da Amazônia [http://www.escoladaamazonia.com.br], which since 2002 has held, in partnership with Cristalino Ecological Foundation (FEC), immersion workshops in southern Amazon on ecology and conservation for students from Alta Floresta and urban centres of Brazil and abroad. Alongside this, I coordinated the Wildlife Conservation Society’s (WCS) Pantanal Conservation Program from 2002 to 2005.

Research Description:
The hunting of jaguars is a major threat to the species, and wherever jaguars live in close proximity to people, they have generally been persecuted. In fact, in a third of the species’ current range they are threatened by indiscriminate killing. Current persecution is allegedly linked to the predation of livestock by the big cats. Research, however, suggests that predation by jaguars accounts in general for only a small percentage of cattle mortality; most calves and cows die from disease, starvation and snake bite, among other causes. Efforts to reduce the conflict between ranchers and jaguars have tended to concentrate on ways to decrease the predation of livestock by jaguars or compensate for lost livestock. These approaches, however, will do little to reduce conflict where jaguar persecution is found to be socially and culturally ingrained. Jaguars have arguably the strongest socio-cultural significance among all species in the areas where they occur. Fear, prejudice, the social significance or simply the excitement of hunting a large predator, among other socio-cultural phenomena, may also explain why people kill jaguars. Therefore, the effective conservation of jaguars requires an integrated approach that takes into account, not only economic factors, but also the strong socio-cultural significance of jaguars.

I am, therefore, investigating the reasons why people kill jaguars in a frontier area of southern Amazon, Brazil, and hence developing interventions to reduce persecution. More specifically, the objectives of this study are to:

Identify the factors that explain variation in persecution and assess their relative importance.
Design and carry out education and communication interventions based on the results obtained from the above.
Implement a monitoring scheme to evaluate the results of these intervention

This study focuses on farms and ranches around Cristalino State Park (CSP), located within the so-called ‘arc of deforestation’, which is where most of the current deforestation in the Amazon is taking place. CSP hosts the highest biodiversity among all state parks in Brazil and, although relatively small (184,900 ha), it is a key landscape conservation unit in this highly threatened area.

I work in collaboration with Cristalino Ecological Foundation (FEC), a local NGO dedicated to the protection of the Cristalino State Park. The project’s educational activities will be conducted through Escola da Amazônia (School of the Amazon), which is CEFs education program in partnership with Amazonarium.


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