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Amazon watershed Water resources remote sensing rain forest geoglyphs Finland ecology ecohydrology earth works biodiversityResearch projects 13
Access to schooling and higher education are considered as primary means to empower marginalized groups and enhance sustainable development in the Global South. In Ecuador the intercultural bilingual education programme that affirmed the fundamental importance of integrating diverse local languages knowledges and pedagogical practices in education was established already in and later amended based on the community-centric ecologically-balanced and culturally-sensitive philosophy of sumakkawsay (buenvivir). However the programme is still only partially applied and thus education typically follows homogenized standards and fails to include specific cultural realities.
Team
Johanna Hohenthal
Improving our understanding of human-environment relations, and particularly of human motivations, rationale and management regimes, is paramount to the success of any biodiversity conservation initiative involving local communities. By comparing approaches, challenges and successes across case study sites, this research aims to identify those contextual settings, socio-cultural traits, incentives, and practical tools that best foster optimum long-term integration of biodiversity conservation and local wellbeing.
Team
Anita Heim; Attila Paksi; Aina Brias; Marketta Vuola; Mohammad Mozumder
Hundreds of geoglyphs, geometrically formed man-made earth works, have only recently been found in southwestern Brazilian Amazonia and adjacent Bolivia. Geoglyphs occur in an area that partly overlaps with bamboo-dominated forests that are exceptional rain forests because they are dominated by a single species. The aim of the project is to find out if there is a causal relationship between bamboo forests and geoglyphs.
Team
Risto Kalliola, Martti Pärssinen, Pirjo K. Virtanen, Kalle Ruokolainen
Visual exploration of data enables users and analysts observe interesting patterns that can trigger new research for further investigation. With the increasing availability of Linked Data, facilitating support for making sense of the data via visual exploration tools for hypothesis generation is critical. Time and space play important roles in this because of their ability to illustrate dynamicity, from a spatial context. Yet, Linked Data visualization approaches typically have not made efficient use of time and space together, apart from typical rather static multivisualization approaches and mashups. We developed ELBAR explorer that visualizes a vast amount of scientific observational data about the Brazilian Amazon Rainforest. The core contribution is a novel mechanism for animating between the different observed values, thus illustrating the observed changes themselves.
Team
Tomi Kauppinen, Suvodeep Mazumdar
Fresh water scarcity due to glacier retreat and decreasing precipitation related to global climate change will be one of the most serious environmental and social challenges in the Andean Amazonian region in this century. Rapidly increasing land use changes make water scarcity even more critical in dry season and, on the other hand, increase flooding and landslide risks in rainy season, because deforested areas have lost their natural water retention and storage capacity. A better understanding of natural water fluxes of forest ecosystems is needed to be able to solve the problems in water cycle.
Team
Johanna Toivonen, Sanna Huttunen, Tinja Pitkämäki, Carlos Gonzales Inca, Lassi Suominen
This research proposal develops a multidisciplinary approach to study tropical forest biodiversity in two Brazilian ecosystems: Amazon and Atlantic forests. The overall objective is to develop new methods of field research and statistical modelling that will allow improved mapping and monitoring of tropical diversity. The main novelty of this project is in the use of new sampling technologies combined with the development of novel theoretical and statistical frameworks for obtaining robust inference at the levels of individuals, populations and communities.
Team
Dr. Otso Ovaskainen, Dr. Milton Cezar Ribeiro, Dr. Mauro Galetti, Dr. Marco Aurélio Pizo, Dr. Jukka Síren, M.Sc Ulisses Camargo
Os objetivos e metas da pesquisa são os seguintes: 1) Objetivo Geral a. Reconstruir a história dos povos aruák antes do contato com os não-índios e depois do contato na Bácia Purus; 2) Objetivos específicos a. Pesquisar a organização política no passado e hoje. b. Pesquisar os processos corporais e educação ligados às negociações interétnicas. c. Comparar líderes e porta-vozes no passado e hoje. d. Pesquisar a participação nas organizações indígenas e na política indígena. e. Determinar o papel histórico das línguas indígenas nas mudanças sofridas. f. Tornar os conhecimentos do passado obtidos através da pesquisa acessíveis aos povos estudados através da publicação de dicionários, livros de ensino de escrita e conversa, e coletâneas de mitos história.
Team
Pirjo Kristiina Virtanen, Sidney da Silva Facundes
Because of the huge species diversity of Amazonian forests, it has been difficult to obtain a general idea of their environmental and floristic variation among sites. This makes it difficult to allocate suitable land uses to areas with different productivity, to adapt the management systems to local ecological conditions, and to identify habitats of high conservation value. Understorey plants (such as pteridophytes) can be used as indicators to rapidly and at relatively low cost evaluate the ecological conditions and species composition of a given rain forest site. The present project will design a species identification tool that conveys to the users of the indicator species approach 1) the knowledge on how to identify the indicator species, and 2) the information on what kind of environment or forest each species indicates. In order to be useful for people who are not plant specialists, the identification tool will be interactive, easy to use, free of botanical jargon, richly illustrated and freely available on the internet.
Team
Hanna Tuomisto, Gabriela Zuquim, Glenda Cárdenas
Estimating how well existing conservation units represent different habitats and their species is necessary for the long-term preservation of biological diversity and for sustainable use of forest resources. The task is especially challenging in Amazonia, which is both extensive and largely unexplored. Therefore, exact enough maps of the distribution of biodiversity are not available. We aim to solve the problem by combining the efforts of two teams that have approached biodiversity-related questions from different points of view. Attention will be given both to the current distribution of biodiversity in Amazonia and to the geological history that has shaped it. This will invove a combination of novel remote sensing methods, exceptionally extensive and internally consistent field data, and a thorough understanding of the geology of the Amazon basin and the ecology of selected indicator plants.
Team
Hanna Tuomisto, Kalle Ruokolainen, Samuli Lehtonen, Jasper Van doninck, Gabriela Zuquim, Gabriel Moulatlet, Glenda Cárdenas
The "United in Diversity: Monumental Landscapes, Regionality, and Cultural Dynamism in Pre-Columbian Western Amazonia" (2011–2015) is a multidisciplinary project focusing on cultural dynamics of the prehistoric indigenous populations in the southwestern Amazon. The geometric earthworks connected by road systems, identified by Brazilian and Finnish researchers in the Upper Purus River Basin, have contributed to formulate a new perspective of Amazonian civilizations. The primary objectives of our project are to reconstruct the cultural, economic, ethnic, and demographic processes involved in the occurrence of the geometric earthwork tradition in the Brazilian states of Acre and Amazonas. The project is sponsored by the Academy of Finland.
Team
Martti Pärssinen, Sanna Saunaluoma, Pirjo Kristiina Virtanen, Denise Schaan, Alceu Ranzi, Antonia Barbosa, Sidney da Silva Facundes + foreign contributors