Qualla: Amanã Sustainable Development Reserve

Amanã Sustainable Development Reserve: Introduction

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Brazil_location_map.svg: NordNordWest derivative work: Виктор В (talk), CC BY-SA 3.0. Amanã Lake is the largest lake in the Amazon region. From above, it branches like an open palm across the rainforest northwest of the Solimões River. During the dry season, manatees gather here - the sluggish, gentle-faced Amazonian manatees, smaller and grayer than their Atlantic cousins, drifting in the shrinking water while the várzea floodplain elsewhere dries out. When the rains return, they leave. They migrate south and west to the várzea forests of Mamirauá, swimming through channels that are dry roads in August and wide rivers in March. The reserve that contains Amanã Lake is not a park in the old sense of a place kept empty of people. It was designed as something else - a place where people and forest stay together, and both benefit.

Image: Brazil_location_map.svg: NordNordWest derivative work: Виктор В (talk) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Amanã Sustainable Development Reserve: The Third Piece of a Larger Plan

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Artur Warchavchik, CC BY-SA 3.0. Amanã was created by decree number 19.021 on August 4, 1998. It covers 2.35 million hectares - about 23,500 square kilometers, roughly the size of Belize - in the north-central part of Amazonas state. To its south and west, across the Japurá River, stretches the 1.12-million-hect...

Image: Artur Warchavchik | CC BY-SA 3.0

Amanã Sustainable Development Reserve: Three Types of Forest, One Place

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Brazil_location_map.svg: NordNordWest derivative work: Виктор В (talk), CC BY-SA 3.0. Most of Amanã is terra firma - the high forest that never floods, growing on well-drained soils that hold century-old canopy trees. Around the lake and along the rivers the forest changes to várzea, which floods with whitewater from the Solimões, and to igapó, which floods with b...

Image: Brazil_location_map.svg: NordNordWest derivative work: Виктор В (talk) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Amanã Sustainable Development Reserve: What Moves Through the Water

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Brazil_location_map.svg: NordNordWest derivative work: Виктор В (talk), CC BY-SA 3.0. The Amazonian manatee is the reserve's flagship endangered species. It is almost impossible to see in the murky water - a large gray shape that surfaces briefly for breath and vanishes. The Amazon river dolphin, the pink boto, fares better visually: it surfaces often and bows its...

Image: Brazil_location_map.svg: NordNordWest derivative work: Виктор В (talk) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Amanã Sustainable Development Reserve: The People Who Voted for a Reserve

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Brazil_location_map.svg: NordNordWest derivative work: Виктор В (talk), CC BY-SA 3.0. The communities along Amanã Lake created the reserve, not the other way around. The Mamirauá Institute of Sustainable Development had spent years developing a new model of protection in the Mamirauá reserve just across the Japurá River, and the approach had worked: local fishing ...

Image: Brazil_location_map.svg: NordNordWest derivative work: Виктор В (talk) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Amanã Sustainable Development Reserve: What a Reserve Protects

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Brazil_location_map.svg: NordNordWest derivative work: Виктор В (talk), CC BY-SA 3.0. A sustainable development reserve is a distinctively Brazilian legal category, created in the 2000 National System of Conservation Units. Unlike a national park, it allows traditional residents to remain and to continue using the land - sustainably, monitored, and with the full p...

Image: Brazil_location_map.svg: NordNordWest derivative work: Виктор В (talk) | CC BY-SA 3.0