assembling real terrain

Rio Juruá · Amazonas, Brasil

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Forest loss2001

2001Hansen / UMD2024

Viewpoint 4.85°S · 67.01°W Western Amazon · Brazil

Map key

Indicative — this study publishes no locations

Rio Juruá Ramsar site (no. 2362, 2018)

ResEx Médio Juruá, ResEx Baixo Juruá & RDS Uacarí

Neighbouring reserves

RDS Uacarí, the largest of the three (632,949 ha), has no boundary in OpenStreetMap; its line is Brazil’s federal register of protected areas (CNUC, Ministério do Meio Ambiente), the polygon supplied by the Amazonas state environment secretariat.

Aquatic megafaunatap a species ↗

Locations are indicative. This study measured perceived change through semi-structured interviews on a five-point scale (SM Table 7) and publishes no coordinates, so all seven species are marked on the river system they share rather than as seven separate ranges. The figure on each card is a perceived change index rather than a population count; see the card.

Giant otter

Pink river dolphin

Black caiman

Gray river dolphin

Amazonian manatee

Giant river turtle

Arapaima

Municipal seat / field base

Human settlement · 2020

People per 100 m cell

scatteredtown

ResEx Médio & Baixo Juruá28 communities

The people live inside the reserves: an extractive reserve is a category Brazil created so that the households already living in a forest hold the right to use it. SM Appendix A counts 13 communities in ResEx Médio Juruá, 15 in Baixo Juruá, 32 in RDS Uacarí, and some 80 outside any reserve; population density across the landscape is under 3 per km². The glow marks the towns rather than the communities. It is WorldPop’s 2020 constrained grid, which places people only where built settlement was mapped: on this plate it lights Carauari, Juruá and Itamarati and almost none of the riverside communities, so a dark riverbank is not an empty one. Population: WorldPop (University of Southampton), CC BY 4.0 — 2020 constrained (BSGM), Brazil. Eleven of the 72 interviewed communities, and the town of Eirunepé at the upstream end of the transect, lie west of this plate.

Altitude bands · 42–148 m inside the reserves

Terra firme forest & interfluve>120

Transition to terra firme100–120

High várzea, levees & beach ridges85–100

Seasonally flooded várzea65–85

Active channel & lowest várzea<65

Bands show altitude, measured from the Copernicus GLO-30 DEM. On a floodplain, elevation is a proxy for how long ground stays under water. Relief across the whole plate is 39–183 m over 308 km, with the vertical scale exaggerated ×32.

Live · forest condition

Active fire—24h

Deforestation—30d

NASA FIRMS · Global Forest Watch

10 km

Rio Juruá

The boundary · the record

The Rio Juruá reserves

The line on this map is three sustainable-use reserves drawn together, because the unit measured on this landscape is the set of community-managed waters rather than a single protected area. In an extractive reserve the households living in the forest hold the right to use it and the duty to protect it.

ResEx Médio Juruá: 253,227 ha 1997 · 13 communities
ResEx Baixo Juruá: 187,980 ha 2001 · 15 communities
RDS Uacarí: 632,949 ha 2005 · 32 communities
Boundary: — as digitised, three reserves
Compactness: — Polsby–Popper
Elevation: 42 – 173 m inside the reserves

Source of the RDS Uacarí boundary. RDS Uacarí is the largest of the three. Its line is CNUC record 0000.13.0989 (release 2025_08), checked against Decreto 25.039/2005: every one of the decree’s eight boundary points lies within 57–559 m of it.
Community protection predates the reserves. Protection of fluvial sand beaches began around 1977, of oxbow lakes around 2008, arapaima management from 2011, and a territorial governance forum was consolidated in 2014.

Why this landscape matters beyond Brazil

Community knowledge as the measurement. The other landscapes in this study count animals: camera-trap detections, line-transect densities, occupancy, population estimates. This one asked riverine communities what they had observed over twenty years, a model for low-cost monitoring that incorporates Traditional Ecological Knowledge.

Community management compared with open access. Across 83 oxbow lakes on a ~500 km reach, protected lakes held a mean of 304.8 (±332.5) arapaima against 9.2 (±9.8) in open-access lakes, and management patterns explained 71.8% of the variation in population size (Campos-Silva & Peres 2016, quoted in SM Appendix A). The standard deviation exceeds the mean, so lakes vary widely.

Seven species in the index. A Priority Species Index should include at least ten species, because an index over fewer is sensitive to the removal of any one. This landscape has seven, and the leave-one-out figures on the index panel show how much each one moves it.

A lived-in river. Population density across the landscape is under three people per square kilometre, and large parts of the basin are recognised as Indigenous territories. Globally, Indigenous and Traditional Territories overlap the study’s candidate landscapes by 37.6%, a figure for all 838 landscapes over 5,000 km².

Potential landscapes in Brazil. Brazil has 118 “potential Priority Species Landscapes” larger than 1,000 km² (4,519,717 km² in total), 76 larger than 2,000 km² (4,458,072 km²) and 49 larger than 5,000 km² (4,374,714 km²). SM-Table 4, derived from the WDPA (UNEP-WCMC), used for this paper by permission. The 37.6% overlap above is from SM Appendix E, the same screen of candidate landscapes, under the same permission.

Reserve areas, dates, community counts, the arapaima comparison and the species set: the paper's authors, Priority Species Index (manuscript in review; the authors’ revision of 29 September 2026) — SM Appendix A, SM Appendix F and SM Table 7; the arapaima figures are Appendix A quoting Campos-Silva & Peres 2016, Scientific Reports 6:34745. Boundaries drawn from OpenStreetMap — ResEx Médio Juruá way 255726867, ResEx Baixo Juruá relation 3817071 — and, for RDS Uacarí, from CNUC (Ministério do Meio Ambiente, release 2025_08, record 0000.13.0989, CC BY; attributes removed and a 0.12 ha degenerate ring dropped). Areas shown are the figures stated in SM Appendix A. Perimeter and compactness are computed from the drawn rings and are therefore scale-dependent. Elevation is measured from the Copernicus GLO-30 model.

1.68% of the Juruá satellite plate was never observed by any scene in the search window and is filled rather than imaged; those pixels are not mapped separately, so fine detail on that plate is not a measurement everywhere. Imagery: Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data 2025–2026 · Elevation: produced using Copernicus WorldDEM-30 © DLR e.V. 2010-2014 and © Airbus Defence and Space GmbH 2014-2018 provided under COPERNICUS by the European Union and ESA; all rights reserved (Copernicus GLO-30). The organisations in charge of the Copernicus programme by law or by delegation do not incur any liability for any use of the Copernicus WorldDEM-30. · Boundaries of ResEx Médio Juruá, ResEx Baixo Juruá and the neighbouring reserves, rivers, roads and place names: © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL) · RDS Uacarí boundary: Ministério do Meio Ambiente — CNUC 2025_08, polygon by SEMA/AM, CC BY · Ramsar site boundary: supplied by the paper's authors (Ramsar site 2362, RSIS) · Index figures: the paper's authors, Priority Species Index (manuscript in review) · An independent visualization by Landseed PBC. Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or produced for ICMBio, SEMA/AM or any community organisation named here.