What are the crops grown by the people of the amazon basin

“It’s terrible. I cried a lot,” says Eric Bastos Gorgens as he recalls the day he had to abandon his quest to reach the tallest known tree in the Amazon. His research team would have been the first to survey the 88.5-metre giant, which had been identified only in data taken during an aerial survey. Nobody had ever seen it or even knew what species it was. Gorgens and his crew of six had spent days trekking through dense, dangerous rainforest in a remote part of northeastern Brazil, some 250 kilometres from the nearest city. But during that expedition in September 2019, they eventually ran into steep terrain and spent several hours trying paths around and over it. Running low on food and fuel — and with no means of sending word to their base camp — the researchers reluctantly turned back. They were just 5 kilometres or so from the tree. “I was so close. We were so close. Maybe one day more — maybe one morning more — we would get there,” says Gorgens, a forest engineer at the Federal University of the Valleys of Jequitinhonha and Mucuri in Diamantina, Brazil. They vowed to come back. Their expedition sounds at times like a tale from science in the nineteenth century — hacking through unexplored jungle with machetes, dodging deadly animals, enduring torrential rains. But they also had help from twenty-first-century tools and data. A drone gave views from high above the forest canopy, and the team had exact GPS coordinates for the unknown tree. During the 2019 expedition, Gorg...

Brazil Nuts: An Emblematic Crop of Sustainability Since 1999, ACA’s project “Conserving Brazil Nut Forests” program has supported more than 500 harvester families in the protection of nearly two million acres of rainforest. Native to the Amazon basin, Brazil nut trees are some of the largest rainforest; they grow up to 165 feet tall and have a lifespan of several hundred years. Because these trees produce selenium-rich nuts only when growing in healthy forests, the earnings from harvesting nuts (which accounts for more than half of the income of these families) serves as an incentive for forest protection. Today, our work is focused on preserving forests and improving the livelihoods of indigenous Brazil nut harvesters in Peru and Bolivia. “Before this program, we were paid less for our Brazil nuts and we did not have a place to store the product, but now… we have storage space and the value of our nuts is higher because we can guarantee that the product is well preserved. In addition, trees that did not produce now do because we know how to take care of them. We didn’t know how to do it before, but now we do thanks to the guidance of Amazon Conservation.” – Gilmar, member of the Tacana Indigenous Community in Bolivia Empowering communities to grow and sell crops sustainably There are times where deforestation happens solely because people need to create an income and grow food in order to survive. In Amazonian forests, where the options of work are limited and poverty can...

Four Indigenous children have survived an Amazon plane crash that killed three adults and then braved the jungle for 40 days before being found alive by Colombian soldiers, bringing a happy ending to a search-and-rescue saga that captivated a nation and forced the usually opposing military and Native people to work together

For decades, there have been reports of the deforestation of Africa. And they are true — the continent’s forests are disappearing, lost mainly to expanding agriculture, logging, and charcoal-making. But the trees? Maybe not, according to new satellite data analyzed by artificial intelligence and a growing body of on-the-ground studies. This new research is finding ever more trees outside forests, many of them nurtured by farmers and sprouting on their previously treeless fields. Across the continent — from Senegal and Niger in the west, to Ethiopia in the east, and Malawi in the south — smallholder farmers are rejecting government advice that trees should be expunged from fields because they get in the way of growing crops. Instead, they are allowing previously suppressed trees to regenerate on their land — to improve soils and crop yields; to provide harvests of fruit, fuelwood, and fodder for their livestock; and ultimately to achieve a better life for their families. As large areas of farmland across Africa turn from brown to green, the results are also good for local economies, offering an easy and cheap way to intensify their farming and increase output, as well as benefiting biodiversity and the global climate. An acre of growing trees on farmland captures and stores up to 4 tons of carbon from the atmosphere each year, researchers say. The latest published evidence of Africa’s resurgent farmland trees comes in the first ever detailed analysis of satellite images of ...

The amazon basin’s evergreen forests are made of tall hardwood trees with broad leaves. The sunlight cannot penetrate into the forests. The interior of these forests is always dark. A forest is made up of trees of different species. Rainforests, on the other hand, consist of a single species of tree, which is called a tree of the same species, but with a different shape and color. The difference is that the trees in the forest are not as tall as they are in a river or a lake, and they do not grow in such a way that they can be seen from a distance. They are, however, much larger than they would be if they were grown in an open area. These trees are called “biodiversity hotspots” because they contain a great variety of plants and animals that have never been seen before in their natural habitat. Table of Contents • • • • • • What kind of vegetation does Amazon have? Brazil’s amazon basin rain forest is a type of tropical rain forests. They contain more than half of the world’s plant and animal species. A tropical rainforest is found in the tropics and subtropics. It is characterized by the presence of tropical trees, shrubs, vines, and grasses. These forests contain trees of all types, including conifers, deciduous trees (such as oaks and maples), and evergreens. What type of vegetation is in the rainforest? Epiphytes include ferns, lichens, mosses, orchids, and bromeliads. Nepenthes and pitcher plants can be found in the tropical rainforest. These plants grow in the soil. ...