On 6/6/22, Vanesa Martin, Jacob Ramthun, and Kaitlin Walker of the University of Alabama in Huntsville traveled to Puerto Breu, Peru, to support Stephanie Spera’s Applied Sciences Team (AST) workshop, “Ecosystem Services and Socio-Environmental Dynamics Workshop in Indigenous Landscapes of the Yurúa/Juruá”. Along with the SERVIR Amazonia consortium member Conservacion Amazonica (ACCA), Spera’s co-Is, David Salisbury, Yunuen Reygadas, and Scott LaRocca facilitated the three-day workshop with more than 120 participants from more than a dozen indigenous communities across Peru and Brazil.
Over the past 2.5 years, AST Principal Investigator Spera’s team has created a series of dynamic online dashboards showing how temperature, evapotranspiration, and forest conditions over the region change. Static maps from these dashboards were printed and discussed in groups during the workshop. Participants provided feedback on these tools and were eager to take the maps back to their communities to better understand their surroundings from a scientific perspective. Beyond this, many participants requested capacity building so that their own community members could lead these types of analyses.
