Santa Helena do Ingles Biodiversity Monitoring

Santa Helena do Ingles is a community located in the Negro River margins. Since I was born I live here, and since the age of 12 years old, my father brought me and my brother to work with him cutting trees in the forest as our only way to earn income. Here people often didn’t have a chance to study, but due to most of the time being spent in the forest, the forest educated us. We have learned how to read nature. Today, our community can make money on less hurtful activities such as tourism, fishing and biodiversity monitoring, like the work done with GainForest, and without having to spend months away in the forest. Today I am a successful owner of a Jungle Inn in the Negro River margin where I earn a living by conserving our biodiversity and teaching about our territories. Our community now can thrive through other non-harmful activities such as community-based tourism, artcrafts, and selling of fruits and fish. However, due to extreme droughts in the Amazon, our guests cannot reach our communities in those seasons. The income we earn from biodiversity monitoring through GainForest gives us extra financial support and gives me a lot of information about our species that I share with my guests on our tours. I am monitoring the biodiversity of my territory through the use of Audiomoths and drone imaging from the canopy of our community’s most vital trees for our socio-economic well-being. By combining our traditional knowledge of flowering and fruiting seasons with precise tree mapping, assisted by the GainForest team, we created digital maps that guide us directly to productive trees. This reduced long forest searches to single-day operations, significantly improving our harvesting efficiency of target species and lowering our exposure to diseases such as malaria and dengue. Audio recorder implementation and sound analysis were essential for capturing bird, frog, insect and mammal species richness and their daily dynamics, allowing us to identify the best hours for hunting, for spotting targeted species in trails with guests, and for identifying the presence of culturally important species such as the Urutau, (a.k.a. the ghost bird; Moon’s mother) (Nictibyus griseus). It also allowed my son to earn a support income through GainForest’s Conservation Data Income (CDI). These solutions provide a reliable support income while empowering our communities’ traditional way of living.