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The Amazon, the world's largest rain forest, is the last frontier in Brazil. The settlement of large and small farmers, squatters, miners, and loggers in this frontier during the past thirty years has given rise to violent conflicts over land as well as environmental duress. Titles, Conflict, and Land Use examines the institutional development involved in the process of land use and ownership in the Amazon and shows how this phenomenon affects the behavior of the economic actors. It explores the way in which the absence of well-defined property rights in the Amazon has led to both economic and social problems, including lost investment opportunities, high costs in protecting claims, and violence. The relationship between land reform and violence is given special attention. The book offers an important application of the New Institutional Economics by examining a rare instance where institutional change can be empirically observed. This allows the authors to study property rights as they emerge and evolve and to analyze the effects of Amazon development on the economy. In doing so they illustrate well the point that often the evolution of economic institutions will not lead to efficient outcomes. This book will be important not only to economists but also to Latin Americanists, political scientists, anthropologists, and scholars in disciplines concerned with the environment.

In the middle of the twentieth century, governments ignored the negative effects of large-scale infrastructure projects. In recent decades, many democratic countries have continued to use dams to promote growth, but have also introduced accompanying programs to alleviate these harmful consequences of dams for local people, to reduce poverty, and to promote participatory governance. This type of dam building undoubtedly represents a step forward in responsible governing. But have these policies really worked? Flooded provides insights into the little-known effects of these approaches through a close examination of Brazil's Belo Monte hydroelectric facility. After three decades of controversy over damming the Xingu River, a tributary of the Amazon, the dam was completed in 2019 under the left-of-center Workers' Party, becoming the world's fourth largest. Billions of dollars for social welfare programs accompanied construction. Nonetheless, the dam brought extensive social, political, and environmental upheaval to the region. The population soared, cost of living skyrocketed, violence spiked, pollution increased, and already overextended education and healthcare systems were strained. Nearly 40,000 people were displaced and ecosystems were significantly disrupted. Klein tells the stories of dam-affected communities, including activists, social movements, non-governmental organizations, and public defenders and public prosecutors. He details how these groups, as well as government officials and representatives from private companies, negotiated the upheaval through protests, participating in public forums for deliberation, using legal mechanisms to push for protections for the most vulnerable, and engaging in myriad other civic spaces. Flooded provides a rich ethnographic account of democracy and development in the making. In the midst of today's climate crisis, this book showcases the challenges and opportunities of meeting increasing demands for energy in equitable ways.

Despite the expansion of floriculture, little is known about insects associated to this crop in northern Brazil. The objective was to identify the main species of defoliator grasshoppers, associated to crops of Heliconia spp. in the northeastern region of State of Pará, Brazil , in the municipalities of Castanhal, Belém and Benevides, from Aug 2004 to Mar 2005. Representatives with higher abundances in these municipalities were the orders Coleoptera, Thysanoptera, Hemiptera and Orthoptera. The collected species of Orthoptera were Cornops frenatum frenatum (Marshall) and Eutropidacris cristata L. (Orthoptera: Acrididae), Prionolopha serrata L. and Chromacris speciosa Thunberg (Orthoptera: Romaleidae), which present a substantial potential to damage heliconias crop in northeastern Pará, Brazil.

Quilombo remnant communities are areas officially recognized by the Brazilian government as historical communities founded by formerly enslaved individuals. These communities are mostly located in the endemic areas of malaria in the Brazilian Amazon. We retrospectively described the prevalence of malaria among individuals living in 32 recognized quilombo remnant communities in the Baiao and Oriximina municipalities located in the Para State. The number of malaria cases and the Annual Parasitic Incidence (API) recorded by the Brazilian malaria surveillance system (SIVEP-Malaria) from January 2005 to December 2020 were analyzed. We found that all communities registered at least one case over the 16-year period, the most frequent parasitic species being Plasmodium vivax (76.1%). During this period, 0.44% (4,470/1,008,714) of the malaria cases registered in Para State were reported in these quilombo remnant communities, with frequencies of 10.9% (856/7,859) in Baiao municipality and 39.1% (3,614/9,238) in Oriximina municipality, showing that individuals living in these rural communities are exposed to malaria. These data indicate that effective surveillance requires improved measures to identify malaria transmission among vulnerable populations living in quilombo remnant communities in the Brazilian Amazon.

In the middle of the twentieth century, governments ignored the negative effects of large-scale infrastructure projects. In recent decades, many democratic countries have continued to use dams to promote growth, but have also introduced accompanying programs to alleviate these harmful consequences of dams for local people, to reduce poverty, and to promote participatory governance. This type of dam building undoubtedly represents a step forward in responsible governing. But have these policies really worked? Flooded provides insights into the little-known effects of these approaches through a close examination of Brazil's Belo Monte hydroelectric facility. After three decades of controversy over damming the Xingu River, a tributary of the Amazon, the dam was completed in 2019 under the left-of-center Workers' Party, becoming the world's fourth largest. Billions of dollars for social welfare programs accompanied construction. Nonetheless, the dam brought extensive social, political, and environmental upheaval to the region. The population soared, cost of living skyrocketed, violence spiked, pollution increased, and already overextended education and healthcare systems were strained. Nearly 40,000 people were displaced and ecosystems were significantly disrupted. Klein tells the stories of dam-affected communities, including activists, social movements, non-governmental organizations, and public defenders and public prosecutors. He details how these groups, as well as government officials and representatives from private companies, negotiated the upheaval through protests, participating in public forums for deliberation, using legal mechanisms to push for protections for the most vulnerable, and engaging in myriad other civic spaces. Flooded provides a rich ethnographic account of democracy and development in the making. In the midst of today's climate crisis, this book showcases the challenges and opportunities of meeting increasing demands for energy in equitable ways.

Background Prior to the pandemic, malaria showed a global downward trend due to control and surveillance efforts. The COVID-19 pandemic contributed to the disruption of progress in malaria control, leading to an increase in cases and deaths, particularly in Africa. In its bulletin, the World Health Organization (WHO) reported the interruption of essential activities, such as active case finding and mass treatment for diseases like malaria, during the pandemic. This resulted in a setback for disease control efforts, with the recovery of these activities projected by 2030. In Brazil, there are no studies on the impact of the pandemic on malaria transmission. For this reason, the study aims to assess the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the disease’s transmission. Methods This is an observational, descriptive, and analytical study with a quantitative approach, which analysed secondary data of reported malaria cases in the state of Pará, Brazil, between 2018 and 2023. Data were obtained from Sivep-Malária (Malaria Epidemiological Surveillance Information System) and the Brazilian Ministry of Health’s COVID-19 database. For statistical analysis, the study period was divided into three periods: pre-pandemic (2018–2019), critical period (2020–2021), and less critical period (2022–2023). Comparisons of sociodemographic and occupational variables, parasite species, and case mobility between periods were tested using the Chi-square test. Results A total of 170,245 malaria cases were reported: 79,125 before the pandemic, 44,830 in the critical period, and 47,502 in the less critical period. Cases among miners increased from 17.2% to 58%. Plasmodium falciparum cases rose from 2.6% to 11.3%. Imported cases from other states accounted for 3813 (2.2%) of the cases. The peaks of autochthonous malaria cases in Pará occurred from August to November between 2018 and 2023. Conclusions The seasonality of the disease was observed to be maintained at levels similar to the pre-COVID-19 pandemic period. The reduction in the number of malaria cases during the critical period can be attributed to the control actions of the disease control programme in the state of Pará, while the increase was associated with the resumption of social interaction habits and greater internal mobility, facilitated by COVID-19 vaccination.

In the last decades, due to human land management that uses fire as a tool, and due to abnormal droughts, many tropical forests have become more susceptible to recurrent wildfires with negative consequences for biodiversity. Yet, studies are usually focused on few taxa and rarely compare different fire frequencies. We examined if the effects of single and recurrent fires are consistent for leaf litter ants, dung beetles, birds (sampled with point‐counts PC and mist net‐MN), saplings, and trees. Recurrent fires had a great effect on forest structure, reducing live tree biomass and number of lianas, and increasing canopy openness and numbers of saplings alive. Recurrent fires had consistently stronger effects on species richness and composition across all sample groups than single fires, except ants. Birds and plants were more grouped in the congruence analysis. The average dissimilarities between control and recurrent‐burned forest were higher than between control and once‐burned forest for all sample groups, furthermore birds and vegetation communities in recurrent‐burned forest are almost entirely dissimilar from the unburned forest. While beta diversity of ants, birds (MN), and trees was not affected by the frequency of fire, it changed for dung beetles, birds (PC), and saplings. Effects of fire on faunal community structure were more due to indirect effects, through vegetation, than through the fire itself. These results reinforce the effect of single and recurrent fires on tropical forests, and highlight the mechanisms acting behind them. Policy‐makers need to explicitly address protection of tropical forests from wildfires in conservation planning.

Albinism is a genetic condition that results in total hypopigmentation of the eyes, fur, skin, hair, scales, and feathers of an organism. Albinism might result in a selective disadvantage for affected animals. Cases of albinism have been previously recorded in Neotropical vertebrates, such as reptiles, mammals, birds, and fish. However, observing albinism in a wild population is still considered to be a rare event. This paper reports a unique case of complete albinism in a red-brocket deer (Mazama americana) living in the Brazilian Amazon rainforest. The individual was observed within the Biological Reserve of Pará State, one of the most deforested regions of the Brazilian Amazon. The survival of the albino red-brocket deer in the wild can be related to mechanisms of apostatic selection, which theorize the survival of individual prey animals whose mutations make them less likely to be attacked by predators. In other words, the more different a prey animal is from others, the less likely it will be targeted by predators. The high abundance prey animals within the Biological Reserve of Tapirapé seems to support this prediction. This report exemplifies the importance of monitoring the biodiversity and promoting the conservation of favorable habitats to support species multiplicity in highly fragmented regions, as in the Brazilian Amazon.

In this paper, we propose a method for resonant optical excitation of ortho states of two-electron donors in silicon, direct transitions to which from the ground state are extremely suppressed in case of a weak spin-orbit coupling. Excitation is proposed to be carried out using the points of anti-crossing of ortho and para states under conditions of uniaxial stress of the crystal. In these points the states cannot be unambiguously assigned to any group of states with a certain spin, as a result of which the optical transition becomes allowed. The structure of the energy levels of two-electron impurities is such that the excitation of such state almost unambiguously leads to the population of the underlying ortho-type state, which is expected to be very long-lived in the case of weak spin-orbit coupling. In the present work, theoretical estimates of the cross sections for optical transitions in the vicinity of the level anticrossing point as a function of strain for strong and weak spin-orbit coupling are made.