TAPAJÓS NATIONAL FOREST, Brazil — We have to walk fast inside the forest to keep up with the scientists and their local guides. It’s the dry season, and the heat in the Amazon Rainforest is suffocating. An hour and a half later, after going up and down several slopes, some so steep that a helping hand is needed from the colleague ahead, we arrive at the stream. Relief. The pure and crystal-clear water of this small river branch isn’t just perfect for quenching our thirst after the walk; it’s the very subject of the scientists’ research. In Brazil’s Tapajós National Forest, in the state of Pará, students and professors from different universities are assessing the conservation status of streams as part of a research project that includes 100 small streams spread between the cities of Santarém and Paragominas, which were analyzed for the first time in 2010. The word used in Brazil for these streams, igarapé, comes from the Tupi-Guarani language and means “canoe path.” Igarapés run from springs toward lakes and rivers, and although much narrower and shallower than the latter, they’re navigable by small boat, as the name suggests. “The great rivers of the Amazon would not exist without those streams, which are their headwaters,” says Cecília Gontijo Leal, an ecologist at the University of Lancaster, U.K., and the Sustainable Amazon Network (RAS). She heads the Understanding and Conserving Tropical Freshwater Ecosystems project. Now, returning to the same sites of the 2010 study, the group of 19 professors…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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