Born in Belém, Brazil, I was exposed to Amazonian natural history from age five and my father's large landholding along the Rio Acará, eastern Pará, consisting largely of undisturbed primary forest, became an exploration playground for my earliest barefooted adventures. For the last 23 years I have been studying wildlife community ecology in Amazonian forests, vertebrate responses to different forms of anthropogenic disturbance, and the biological criteria for designing large nature reserves. I currently co-direct four ecology and conservation research programs in neotropical forests, including the ecology of key timber and non-timber forest resources; patterns of vertebrate assemblage structure in Amazonian forests; the biological dynamics of hyper-disturbed and fragmented forest landscapes, and the biodiversity consequences of land-use change. I have published ~150 refereed papers on neotropical forest ecology and conservation at the population, community, landscape, and continental scale. In 1995, I received a "Biodiversity Conservation Leadership Award", and in 2000 was elected an "Environmentalist Leader for the New Millennium" by Time Magazine and CNN network. I am currently a Reader in Conservation Biology at the University of East Anglia, where I started a tropical forest ecology research group, and divide my time between Norwich (UK) and field work at multiple field sites throughout lowland Brazilian Amazonia and neighbouring countries.
Key publications
Peres, C.A. et al. 2003. Demographic Threats to the Sustainability of Brazil
Nut Exploitation. Science 302: 2112-2114.
Peres, C.A. & Lake, I.R. 2003. Extent of nontimber resource extraction in
tropical forests: accessibility to game vertebrates by hunters in the Amazon
basin. Conservation Biology 17:521-535.
Barlow, J and C.A. Peres. 2004. Avifaunal responses to single and recurrent
wildfires in Amazonian forests. Ecological Applications 14:1358-1373.
Peres, C.A. 2001. Synergistic effects of subsistence hunting and habitat
fragmentation on Amazonian forest vertebrates. Conservation Biology
15:1490-1505.
Laurance, W.F. and C.A. Peres, editors (2006). Emerging Threats to Tropical
Forests. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. 520 p.
Peres, C.A. 2000. Effects of subsistence hunting on vertebrate community
structure in Amazonian forests. Conservation Biology 14(1):240-253.
|