The Western Amazon has experienced record lows in riverlevels late 2005. Coupled with reduced local precipitation, these exigent climatic circumstances are putting livelihoods and ecosystems under unique stresses. This research is designed to permit field data collection during low and rising water levels in the western Amazon, taking advantage of this unprecedented confluence of extreme weather with natural and anthropogenic disturbances. The research will take place in the city of Iquitos in the northwest Peruvian Amazon. The goal is to acquire spatially explicit information that can be tied to satellite imagery: locational (GPS) data on the extents and land cover of land surfaces exposed by the low water levels, accompanied by field measures of water characteristics. It would be surprising if water levels do not rise over the next several months. If so, the biophysical parameters measured will record the return of a normal flood cycle. If not, then this will be an opportunity to measure in the field an extreme event. We also will evaluate through individual, village or community head, and focus group interviews the perceptions of and reactions to an extreme baseline for livelihood responses to what is typically among the Amazon's wettest and most flooded environments. We view this as a way to bracket and calibrate socio-economic responses to unusual events within a cyclical environmental regime that is also under pressure from the forces of urbanization and globalization.
Four research themes are addressed by this research: 1) investigating the potential of fire disturbance and possible changing of disturbance regimes (from flooding to fire) as new agents of landscape change, (particularly in the ecologically and economically critical palm swamps); 2) ascertaining magnitude of both population and landscape impacts of historically extreme climatic and low water flooding stages; 3) establishing baseline measurements of riverine-based ecological gradients, including sediment flow, black water/white water switch points, and lentic resource ailability/extraction; and 4) probing whether future longer term / historical study is warranted for assessing dynamics and dynamism of the area's coupled natural-human system given the exigent circumstances now transforming the region and its inhabitants.
Two immediate and vital societal impacts will be addressed by this work 1) the area's population/culture groups will be given the uncommon opportunity to self-define their level(s) and type(s) of vulnerability associated with these rapidly changing flood and precipitation levels; and 2) this work will provide to partner IIAP (Peruvian Amazon Research Institute) and any other interested government agencies / NGOs a preliminary assessment of triage communities in most need of local intervention for assistance in responding to nutritional, livelihood, or other shortfalls due to extreme climatic events and their repercussions.
