When people think of the great rivers of the world, the Amazon River of South America immediately comes to mind. Filled with giant snakes and fish that like the taste of blood and flesh, the Amazon is like no other place in the world. Located near the equator, the Amazon River starts as a small stream in the Andes Mountains within a hundred miles of the Pacific Ocean. From here, it travels along the northern part of the continent. Rain and melting snow increase its size. So do more than a thousand tributaries. The Amazon River’s path takes it through the world’s largest rain forest, a place where many thousands of plants and animals make their home. For several months out of the year, high rains cause the Amazon River to leave its banks and wash into the Amazon basin for millions of square miles. The flooded forests create a unique ecosystem like no other place in the world. The Amazon River creates life, food, and medicines.

A “compelling and elegantly written” history of the fight for the Amazon basin and the work of a brilliant but overlooked Brazilian intellectual (Times Literary Supplement, UK). The fortunes of the late nineteenth century’s imperial powers depended on a single raw material—rubber—with only one source: the Amazon basin. This scenario ignited a decades-long conflict that found Britain, France, Belgium, and the United States fighting with and against the new nations of Peru, Bolivia, and Brazil for the forest’s riches. In the midst of this struggle, the Brazilian author and geographer Euclides da Cunha led a survey expedition to the farthest reaches of the river. The Scramble for the Amazon tells the story of da Cunha’s terrifying journey, the unfinished novel born from it, and the global strife that formed the backdrop for both. Haunted by his broken marriage, da Cunha trekked through a beautiful region thrown into chaos by guerrilla warfare, starving migrants, and native slavery. All the while, he worked on his masterpiece, a nationalist synthesis of geography, philosophy, biology, and journalism entitled Lost Paradise. Hoping to unveil the Amazon’s explorers, spies, natives, and brutal geopolitics, Da Cunha was killed by his wife’s lover before he could complete his epic work. once the biography of Da Cunha, a translation of his unfinished work, and a chronicle of the social, political, and environmental history of the Amazon, The Scramble for the Amazon is a work of thrilling intellectual ambition.

The Amazon is a giant piece of "amphibian" land which is the result of complex geological and evolutionary processes. The number of living beings in such a land is difficult to estimate. The interactions between these organ isms and the environment are fascinating but barely understood. These features lured us to the Amazon in 1981. However, soon after, we realized that the dimensions of these interactions were overwhelming. This book is designed to review aspects of the physiology and biochemistry of fishes of the Amazon. The description of the pulsative nature of the environment and the distinct features of the ichthyofauna of the Amazon were central to the main goal. Nevertheless, any complete view is limited by the magnitude of the intraspecific variability coupled with the complex fluctuations of the environment. Thus, we have placed an emphasis on respiratory physiology and biochemistry. The reference list was made as complete as possible, particularly regarding special publications not readily available. We hope that this book is useful for comparative physiologists, tropical biologists, and the people interested in interactions between organ isms and their environment. We are grateful to many people who contributed to the making of this book. Our initial ideas were influenced by Drs. Arno Schwantes, Maria Lufza Schwantes, Jose Tundisi, Anna Emflia Vazzoler, and Naercio Menezes.

"What are the fluxes of greenhouse gases across the atmospheric interface of ecosystems? How much carbon is stored in the biomass and soils of the basin? How are elements from the land transferred to the basin's surface waters? What is the sum of elements transferred from land to ocean, and what is its marine "fate"? This book of original chapters by experts in chemical and biological oceanography, tropical agronomy and biology, and the atmospheric sciences will address these and other important questions."

Igapó forests are a common part of the Amazon whose ecosystems are critical to our shared human future. The introduction addresses the structure, function and dynamics of igapó forests in the Amazon basin, focusing on their uniqueness due to their high level of complexity defined as the many ways that different components of igapó forests in the Amazon basin ecosystem interact and also on how those interactions are on a higher-order compared to other tropical forests. The text then breaks down the igapó ecosystem using these sections: (1) Igapó forests over space and time, (2) Water, light and soils, (3) The carbon cycle, (4) Litter, fungi and invertebrates, (5) Vertebrates, (6) Plant population studies, (7) Plant community studies, and (8) Human impacts and management. Experts from around the world serve as chapter authors that review what is known about their specific part of the igapó ecosystem, what research they have done, and also what needs to be done in the future.

This book provides comparative data on fish ecology and small-scale fisheries between Tapajos (clear water) and Negro (black water) rivers, in the Brazilian Amazon. These rivers are less studied than white water rivers and few books on Amazon fishes have addressed more than one river basin. These data can serve as a baseline to check future changes or impacts in these rivers, which can be affected by development projects, such as highways, deforestation, mining and dams. Besides information on fish biology, the book also discusses fish uses, fisheries and its importance for riverine people, comparing these data for each fish species between sites located inside and outside conservation units. The book is an outcome of the research project ‘Linking sustainability of small-scale fisheries, fishers’ knowledge, conservation and co-management of biodiversity in large rivers of the Brazilian Amazon’, which was coordinated by the editor of this volume and funded by United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine (NAS).