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Building bridges between environmental and political agendas is essential nowadays in face of the increasing human pressure on natural environments, including wetlands. Wetlands provide critical ecosystem services for humanity and can generate a considerable direct or indirect income to the local communities. To meet many of the sustainable development goals, we need to move our trajectory from the current environmental destructive development to a wiser wetland use. The current article contain a proposed agenda for the Pantanal aiming the improvement of public policy for conservation in the Pantanal, one of the largest, most diverse, and continuous inland wetland in the world. We suggest and discuss a list of 11 essential interfaces between science, policy, and development in region linked to the proposed agenda. We believe that a functional science network can booster the collaborative capability to generate creative ideas and solutions to address the big challenges faced by the Pantanal wetland.

The Pantanal is considered the largest continuous freshwater wetland in the world, and its sustainable use requires a unified conceptual framework. The lengthy process to establish public policies has contributed to the increasing vulnerability of the Pantanal. Given the need for a conceptual basis to help this process, we elaborate a list of eight basic principles based on the accumulated scientific evidence: (i) Consider the Paraguay River Basin a management unity; (ii) Establish rules that follow the concept of restricted use approach; (iii) Ensure the ecologically sustainable use of the Pantanal; (iv) Maintain the environmental heterogeneity and functionality in the Pantanal landscapes; (v) Maintain the hydrological integrity and connectivity; (vi) Ensure the environmental representativeness of the protected areas network; (vii) Provide economic incentives for conservationist use of the land; and (viii) Recognize and protect traditional people, their values, resources, and way of living. However, the elaboration of public policies should be a participatory and inclusive decision‐making process towards a more just and sustainable future. The Pantanal is facing the challenge of preparing public policies at federal and state levels, but there is the need of a conceptual basis to support this process. This article prepared a list of eight main principles to be considered by legislators and decision‐makers, aiming to ensure proper protection and management strategies provided by the public policies. We emphasize that this process should be participatory and inclusive, towards a more just and sustainable future for the Pantanal.

In this study, we evaluated how cichlid assemblages are affected by seasonal and interannual variations in water volume in the floodplain lagoons of the Cuiabá River in the Pantanal wetland. Eleven lagoons were sampled in the early dry season and the early rainy season over a three-year period. Analysis of similarity (ANOSIM) showed that the species compositions and relative abundances were distinct between the seasons, which indicates that neither persistence nor stability was maintained on a seasonal basis. However, the interannual comparisons show the opposite tendency, indicating strong stability and persistence on an annual basis. These results indicate that the cichlid assemblages in these lagoons have two equilibrium points, one in the early dry season and the other in the early rainy season, and that the assemblages alternate between these points through the hydrologic cycle. In addition to the effect of the water level variation, the abundance distribution is also affected by conductivity and pH, which also influence the total abundance of the species in the assemblage.