One year photographing the animal crop raiders of the Amazon

Rural communities in the Amazon rainforest live alongside an incredibly diverse set of animals. When some of those animals damage and eat farmers’ crops (“crop-raiding”), it creates a challenge for conservationists, who need to understand the lives of the people who coexist with that wildlife.

My colleagues and I recently spent a year in the Médio Juruá region of Amazonas, Brazil, using motion-activated camera traps to take photos of the many animals that live on or near Amazonian farms. Along with interviews of farmers, this enabled us to study which animals cause the most crop damage, how this affects the livelihoods of rural Amazonians and how these communities respond to crop raiders. Our hope was to understand how this issue might affect attempts to preserve wildlife and to offer support to local farmers if they wanted it.

The Médio Juruá region is a vast area of staggeringly biodiverse lowland tropical forest inhabited by river-dwelling communities, who descend from a mix of indigenous Amerindians, European colonists and former slaves from Africa. Our research team (comprising myself, my colleague Professor Carlos Peres, and Hugo Costa from the State University of Santa Cruz) traveled using small boats and dug-out canoes along the sinuous waterways and through the flooded forests. The region experiences a massive ten-meter-high annual flood, which has wide-ranging impacts on the local ecosystems and the livelihoods of the human inhabitants.

In the year we spent living and working with...