A social-ecological database to advance research on infrastructure development impacts in the Brazilian Amazon

Abstract

Recognized as one of the world’s most vital natural and cultural resources, the Amazon faces a wide variety of threats from natural resource and infrastructure development. Within this context, rigorous scientific study of the region’s complex social-ecological system is critical to inform and direct decision-making toward more sustainable environmental and social outcomes. Given the Amazon’s tightly linked social and ecological components and the scope of potential development impacts, effective study of this system requires an easily accessible resource that provides a broad and reliable data baseline. This paper brings together multiple datasets from diverse disciplines (including human health, socio-economics, environment, hydrology, and energy) to provide investigators with a variety of baseline data to explore the multiple long-term effects of infrastructure development in the Brazilian Amazon.

The changing hydrology of a dammed Amazon

“…These databases were coupled with other hydrological, environmental, social, and economic data of Tucker Lima et al . ( 56 ) and also made available on the website of the Amazon Dams Network/Rede Barragens Amazônicas ( http://amazondamsnetwork.org/amazon-databases/ ).…”

“…Using this approach, we identified 40 flow stations associated with 33 dams that had sufficiently long records for analysis (tables S1 and S2), allowing us to assess the impacts of both individual and multiple dams. A complete description of hydrology and dam data sets, which have since been published in a larger social-ecological database ( 56 ), is given in Methods.…”

Dam-Induced Hydrologic Alterations in the Rivers Feeding the Pantanal

“…Globally, total renewable power capacity more than doubled in the decade 2007-2017(REN21, 2018, with a recent resurgence in focus on hydropower, especially in the developing tropics (Zarfl et al, 2015;Winemiller et al, 2016). Although hydroelectric energy is considered a source of "clean" energy (Newell et al, 2019), there are myriad environmental and social impacts related to dam operations (e.g., Fearnside, 2016;Lima et al, 2016;Latrubesse et al, 2017;Athayde et al, 2019) that must be evaluated when considering the true costs and benefits of hydropower. One critical factor is how dam operation and location alter the hydrological dynamics in the basins where impoundments are located (e.g., Magilligan and Nislow, 2005;Poff and Zimmerman, 2010).…”

Automatic Acquisition and Sustainable Use of Political-Ecological Data

“…A static, one-time collection of social-ecological data on the Brazilian Amazon is described in Lima et al (2016). To this author's knowledge, however, other than the work reported on herein, there is no literature and no exemplars of websites that continuously gather political-ecological data, offer it to the public through security protocols, and offer software for using its data to compute ecosystem management policies.…”