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The missionaries of the Society of Jesus emerged as significant social and political agents in the Colony, allowing the presence of the crown to be felt. As these men took on the responsibility for the health care of the colony's inhabitants, this enabled the Order to build a significant body of knowledge, the restricted circulation of which among its members conferred political importance upon them in the Portuguese Court. Communication, in this context, is positioned as a tool for gathering power in the face of situations experienced by the missionaries, due to its political dimension. Lastly, we seek to highlight the role of the circulation of missionary knowledge in the process of power configuration in the colonial world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wholesale conversion of natural Amazonian ecosystems has been encouraged by Brazil's extreme antienvironmental government, and historical forest loss explains municipal-scale voting prevalence. Embracing a new administration would strengthen local-to-regional governance, suppress illegal land grabbing, deforestation, logging, and gold mining, thereby protecting the world's most species-rich forest domain and ensuring global sustainability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Finding new pathways for reconciling socioeconomic well-being and nature sustainability is critically important for contemporary societies, especially in tropical developing countries where sustaining local livelihoods often clashes with biodiversity conservation. Many projects aimed at reconciling the goals of biodiversity conservation and social aspirations within protected areas (PAs) have failed on one or both counts. Here, we investigate the social consequences of living either inside or outside sustainable-use PAs in the Brazilian Amazon, using data from more than 100 local communities along a 2,000-km section of a major Amazonian river. The PAs in this region are now widely viewed as conservation triumphs, having implemented community comanagement of fisheries and recovery of overexploited wildlife populations. We document clear differences in social welfare in communities inside and outside PAs. Specifically, communities inside PAs enjoy better access to health care, education, electricity, basic sanitation, and communication infrastructure.Moreover, living within a PA was the strongest predictor of household wealth, followed by cash-transfer programs and the number of people per household. These collective cobenefits clearly influence life satisfaction, with only 5%of all adult residents inside PAs aspiring tomove to urban centers, compared with 58% of adults in unprotected areas. Our results clearly demonstrate that large-scale “win–win” conservation solutions are possible in tropical countries with limited financial and human resources and reinforce the need to genuinely empower local people in integrated conservation-development programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Populations of migratory waterbirds are facing dramatic declines worldwide due to illegal hunting, habitat loss and climate change. Conservation strategies to reverse these trends are imperative, especially in tropical developing countries, which almost invariably allocate insufficient levels of investment for environmental protection. Here, we compared the effectiveness of sustainable-use Protected Areas (PAs) and Community-based Conservation (CBC) arrangements for the conservation of migratory waterbirds that breed on seasonal riverine sandy beaches in Brazilian Amazonia. We modeled local population responses of four migratory waterbird species on 155 beaches along a ~1,600 km section of a major tributary of the Amazon, as a function of community enforcement, official protection status, human pressure and landscape features. We show that 21 community-protected beaches within the study area host more than 80% of all sampled birds. Black Skimmers showed the most dramatic response, with breeding numbers 135-fold larger in CBC arrangements compared to beaches with no official protection status. The same pattern was observed for nesting Large-Billed and Yellow-Billed Terns. For the Near Threatened Orinoco Goose, PA status was the strongest predictor of local population size. These dramatic results demonstrate the value of protected refugia, achieved through the concerted action of participating local communities, to support breeding populations of key waterbird species. This highly-effective and low-cost conservation model can potentially be replicated in other regions of the developing world experiencing increasingly intensive exploitation of riverine natural resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tropical floodplains secure the protein supply of millions of people, but only sound management can ensure the long‐term continuity of such ecosystem services. Overfishing is a widespread threat to multitrophic systems, but how it affects ecosystem functioning is poorly understood, particularly in tropical freshwater food webs. Models based on temperate lakes frequently assume that primary producers are mostly bottom‐up controlled by nutrient and light limitations, with negligible effects of top‐down forces. Yet this assumption remains untested in complex tropical freshwater systems experiencing marked spatiotemporal variation.We use consolidated community‐based fisheries management practices and spatial zoning to test the relative importance of bottom‐up versus top‐down drivers of phytoplankton biomass, controlling for the influence of local to landscape heterogeneity. Our study focuses on 58 large Amazonian floodplain lakes under different management regimes that resulted in a gradient of apex‐predator abundance. These lakes, distributed along ~600 km of a major tributary of the Amazon River, varied widely in size, structure, landscape context, and hydrological seasonality.Using generalised linear models, we show that community‐based fisheries management, which controls the density of apex predators, is the strongest predictor of phytoplankton biomass during the dry season, when lakes become discrete landscape units. Water transparency also emerges as an important bottom‐up factor, but phosphorus, nitrogen and several lake and landscape metrics had minor or no effects on phytoplankton biomass. During the wet‐season food pulse, when lakes become connected to adjacent water bodies and homogenise the landscape, only lake depth explained phytoplankton biomass.Synthesis and applications. Tropical freshwaters fisheries typically assume that fish biomass is controlled by bottom‐up mechanisms, so that overexploitation of large predators would not affect overall ecosystem productivity. Our results, however, show that top‐down forces are important drivers of primary productivity in tropical lakes, above and beyond the effects of bottom‐up factors. This helps us to understand the enormous success of community‐based 'fishing agreements' in the Amazon. Multiple stakeholders should embrace socio‐ecological management practices that shape both bottom‐up and top‐down forces to ensure biodiversity protection, sustainable fisheries yields and food security for local communities and regional economies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pirarucu (Arapaima spp.) are the world's largest scaled freshwater fish, reaching 3 m in length and >200 kg in weight. Historical overfishing has devastated populations of this remarkable fish across Amazonian floodplains, but community‐based management programmes are now stimulating the recovery of wild populations.Pirarucu have evolved a unique set of life history traits, some of which have important implications for population management. Individuals exhibit lateral annual migration patterns during the prolonged annual flood pulse, entering flooded forests to reproduce and forage. During this period, although managed fish stocks become less monopolisable by local communities responsible for managing protected lakes, pirarucu can occupy and reproduce in new environments and thus potentially contribute to population recovery.Here, we show a strong pattern of pirarucu (Arapaima cf. gigas) population recovery under community‐based management in an area along the Juruá River, in western Brazilian Amazonia. We show evidence of population recovery even outside formal protected areas, reinforcing the suitability of pirarucu community‐based management as a powerful tool for both biodiversity conservation and the improvement of local livelihoods. We also show pirarucu movements across a floodplain mosaic—including lakes, the main river channel, tributary streams, and flooded forests—during the wet season.Our results support evidence of site fidelity among migrating pirarucu, justifying the high effort invested by local communities in seasonally protecting lakes from poachers and illegal fishers. Finally, restricted daily movement patterns by pirarucu support the suitability of population estimates based on day‐time counts because the chance of double counting is substantially reduced during the day when these counts are conducted. We highlight the strong suitability of this species for community‐based management, since they can: (1) replenish new environments during the wet season through migration and possibly also reproduction; and (2) be efficiently harvested during the dry season, delivering social and ecological benefits at large spatial scales.Positive examples of fisheries management, which align biodiversity conservation and social development, are important for building optimism, and influencing local and international stakeholders. Our study shows how engaging and empowering local communities to help monitor the movement ecology of target species can be an effective strategy to support the sustainable management of aquatic resources in tropical environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Globally, illegal sport hunting can threaten prey populations when unregulated. Due to its covert nature, illegal sport hunting poses challenges for data collection, hindering efforts to understand the full extent of its impacts. We gathered social media data to analyze patterns of illegal sport hunting and wildlife depletion across Brazil. We collected data for 2 years (2018–2020) across 5 Facebook groups containing posts depicting pictures of illegal sport hunting events of native fauna. We described and mapped these hunting events by detailing the number of hunters involved, the number of species, the mean body mass of individuals, and the number and biomass of individuals hunted per unit area, stratified by Brazilian biome. We also examined the effects of defaunation on hunting yield and composition via regression models, rank–abundance curves, and spatial interpolation. We detected 2046 illegal sport hunting posts portraying the hunting of 4658 animals (∼29 t of undressed meat) across all 27 states and 6 natural biomes of Brazil. Of 157 native species targeted by hunters, 19 are currently threatened with extinction. We estimated that 1414 hunters extracted 3251 kg/million km2. Some areas exhibited more pronounced wildlife depletion, in particular the Atlantic Forest and Caatinga biomes. In these areas, there was a shift from large mammals and reptiles to small birds as the main targeted taxa, and biomass extracted per hunting event and mean body mass across all taxonomic groups were lower than in other areas. Our results highlight that illegal sport hunting adds to the pressures of subsistence hunting and the wild meat trade on Brazil's wildlife populations. Enhanced surveillance efforts are needed to reduce illegal sport hunting levels and to develop well‐managed sustainable sport hunting programs. These can support wildlife conservation and offer incentives for local communities to oversee designated sport hunting areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conservation's capacity to deal with anthropogenic environmental threats within Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) varies enormously, especially in developing countries that are often immersed in weak enforcement, ineffective management and shortages of resources. A deeper understanding of the causes of these threats is fundamental for identifying effective management solutions. Here, we investigate the presumptive drivers of environmental threats across 40 Brazilian MPAs. We categorized and quantified environmental threats from two independent sources: i) the results of systematic social surveys carried out as part of WWF's RAPPAM assessment, as primary data source, and; ii) data gathered from news media articles related to the MPAs (secondary data source). We identified 461 reports of threats that we classified into three general categories: overexploitation, urbanization and land use threats. The presence of overexploitation threats was strongly associated with extreme poverty of local communities close to the MPAs. Threats also seem to be more frequent in category V MPAs, which in Brazil are Environmental Protection Areas (EPA), with multiple use objectives. Threats were concentrated on the North and Southeast coasts of Brazil. We found that data from news media can be used for qualitative assessment of threats, but has limited potential for quantification. Our findings highlight the need for policy makers and MPA managers to adopt a broader perspective that considers the role of social inequalities in promoting and exacerbating environmental threats. While recognizing that conservation has limited capacity to address the widespread social inequalities found in many tropical developing countries, if the socioeconomic context of local communities is significantly compromising conservation efforts it may be necessary to target and prioritize social interventions as a prerequisite for effective MPA management and governance. Image 1 • Extreme poverty is strongly associated with natural resource overexploitation. • Local socioeconomic vulnerability is associated with environmental threats. • MPAs from Category V in IUCN classification shows more environmental threats. • Balancing socio-ecological management is needed for legal compliance and collaboration. • Good governance in MPA is required for better conservation outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Local ecological knowledge (LEK) has been increasingly acknowledged as a potential source of information on natural resources, especially in under sampled areas. In the Amazon, a small-scale fishery is multispecific, and fishers are well acquainted with the biology and life history strategies of fish species. This study analyzed the potential of small-scale fishers' LEK to supply information on the biology and ecology of high-value species, including pirarucu (Arapaima spp.), tambaqui (Colossoma macropomum, Cuvier, 1816), and jaraqui (Semaprochilodus spp.). We interviewed rural and urban fishers about bio-ecological aspects of these species and reviewed the scientific literature on the same aspects. In addition, we evaluated the possible effects of their category (rural or urban) and fishing experience on responses. Results demonstrate that fishers have detailed knowledge about species predation, diet and habitat use, regardless of the category they fall into. However, LEK on weight and maximum length of pirarucu and tambaqui varied according to fisher category revealing different perceptions. We also found that fishing experience did not influence fisher's LEK on these bio-ecological characteristics. Our findings reinforce that LEK can be a useful source of ecological traits for these species, contributing to fisheries management in the Amazon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The giant arapaima (Arapaima sp.) has been described as a fish of change in Amazonia because of its important role in the conservation of floodplains, food security and income generation for rural communities. Nonetheless, despite the cultural, ecological and economic importance of arapaima, data on diet are scarce. Aiming to expand knowledge about arapaima diet in western Amazonia, scientific knowledge was integrated with the knowledge of local dwellers. During the low‐water period (September 2018) and the falling‐water period (June 2019), arapaima stomachs were collected from 11 floodplain lakes in the middle Juruá River. All fishes were measured [TL (total length)] and sexed. Food items from each stomach were categorized as fishes, invertebrates, plants and bone remains and weighed. Also, in the latter period, experienced local fishers were interviewed about arapaima feeding. This integrated approach revealed that young arapaima eat fish and invertebrates but adult arapaima eat fish of a wide range of species, which were mainly of low and intermediate trophic positions. This study reports the first case of cannibalism for arapaima and also shows that during the low‐water period, many individuals had empty stomachs or only some small fish‐bone remains and/or plant material. Arapaima sex and TL had no influence on the absence of prey in stomach contents. Overall, it can be concluded that local people had consistent ethnobiological knowledge of arapaima feeding ecology that could be useful within management projects in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Arid and semiarid ecosystems display several environmental filters naturally restricting plant community composition. Such filters become more severe after some disturbance and may thus hamper the survival of young plants. The role of remnant trees in succession needs to be better understood to identify patterns and functional traits that might facilitate natural regeneration in drylands. This study evaluated the role of remnant trees in the succession process in the caatinga vegetation (Brazilian seasonally dry tropical forest), testing the effect of a typical tree, the juazeiro (Ziziphus joazeiro Mart.) in richness and abundance of seedlings in areas of abandoned pasture, in Northeastern Brazil. A perimeter was outlined around each plant (n = 20) with a diameter equivalent to each tree crown; all seedlings of woody species up to 0.5 m in height, within that perimeter, were collected and identified. Control areas with the same dimensions were delimited in adjacent locations (n = 20) without the influence of remnant trees, followed by the same data surveys. Mean species richness was of 7.8 ± 4.8 under the juazeiro canopies, compared to 2.3 ± 1.9 in the control areas. Species abundance was also greater under the presence of Z. joazeiro , with an average of 16.9 ± 4.8, against 4.1 ± 4.2 individuals in the controls. Among the abiotic factors evaluated, it is suggested that soil and air temperatures may show a greater influence on the recruitment of seedlings, benefiting natural regeneration under Z. joazeiro. Z. joazeiro ramnant trees appear to facilitate the natural regeneration of tropical drylands. We suggest considering the use of these plants as catalysts for the nucleation process in the restoration of the caatinga. [Display omitted] • Facilitation plays an important role in dryland succession. • Remnant trees catalyse the natural regeneration process, creating regeneration nuclei. • Remnant trees can increase the diversity and density of seedlings in areas undergoing natural regeneration. • Remnant plants possibly alleviate water deficit and heat stress in drylands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agricultural commodity production is one the main drivers of deforestation in Legal Brazilian Amazonia resulting in a deforested and/or fragmented landscape formed by forest remnants of different sizes and shape embedded within the agricultural matrix. As an ecosystem engineer and a crucial seed predator, white‐lipped peccaries (Tayassu pecari) play a pivotal role in forest structure, biodiversity, and nutrient cycling. However, they are highly sensitive to habitat fragmentation and hunting pressure. White‐lipped peccaries are, therefore, a wide‐ranging "landscape species," the spatial and ecological requirements of which can be used to guide conservation planning in human‐modified landscapes. Using data from GPS‐tracked individuals in large‐scale mechanized agriculture landscapes in the state of Mato Grosso, Brazil's largest soybean and maize producer, we investiated the home range size and resource selection during both the crop and non‐crop season. We observed a seasonal variation in home range size and an increased selection for croplands during the crop season. White‐lipped peccaries favored native vegetation patches and also exhibited avoidance of locations distant from perennial water bodies and distant cropland locations far from forest remmants. This study can contribute to inform effective conservation strategies and land management practices aimed at preserving suitable habitats and promoting wildlife coexistence with working agricultural landscapes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Polycystic Echinococcosis (PE), a neglected life-threatening zoonotic disease caused by the cestode Echinococcus vogeli, is endemic in the Amazon. Despite being treatable, PE reaches a case fatality rate of around 29% due to late or missed diagnosis. PE is sustained in Pan-Amazonia by a complex sylvatic cycle. The hunting of its infected intermediate hosts (especially the lowland paca Cuniculus paca) enables the disease to further transmit to humans, when their viscera are improperly handled. In this study, we compiled a unique dataset of host occurrences (~86000 records) and disease infections (~400 cases) covering the entire Pan-Amazonia and employed different modeling and statistical tools to unveil the spatial distribution of PE's key animal hosts. Subsequently, we derived a set of ecological, environmental, climatic, and hunting covariates that potentially act as transmission risk factors and used them as predictors of two independent Maximum Entropy models, one for animal infections and one for human infections. Our findings indicate that temperature stability promotes the sylvatic circulation of the disease. Additionally, we show how El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) extreme events disrupt hunting patterns throughout Pan-Amazonia, ultimately affecting the probability of spillover. In a scenario where climate extremes are projected to intensify, climate change at regional level appears to be indirectly driving the spillover of E. vogeli. These results hold substantial implications for a wide range of zoonoses acquired at the wildlife-human interface for which transmission is related to the manipulation and consumption of wild meat, underscoring the pressing need for enhanced awareness and intervention strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate-related changes taking place in Amazonia substantially impact social-ecological systems, affecting local livelihoods strongly reliant on natural resources. Here, we investigate climate change impacts on different livelihood activities in western Amazonia, through the lens of local ecological knowledge. We conducted semi-structured interviews and surveys with ∼400 residents from 24 communities spread across a ∼600 km stretch of the Juruá River. Residents reported a vast set of changes, many referring to changes in the atmospheric system (e.g., more summer rainfall), but with cascading effects in physical, biological, and human systems. Different livelihood activities are impacted with different intensities and by different climate-related changes. While most changes have negative impacts, residents recognize some positive impacts of climate-driven changes (e.g., large river floods positively impact fishing). Beyond demonstrating the manifold and multidirectional climate change impacts, our findings highlight the contribution of local ecological knowledge in identifying vulnerable livelihood activities and biodiversity-based value chains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Involving communities in sustainable wildlife management in tropical forests can ensure food security and livelihoods of millions of forest dwellers that depend on wild meat, and also safeguard hunted species. Mathematical models have been developed to assess hunting sustainability; but these require empirical information on reproductive parameters of the prey species, often challenging to obtain.Here, we suggest that if local people can accurately identify the reproductive status of hunted animals in the field, these data could fill the existing knowledge gap regarding species' life‐history traits and enable better assessments of hunting impacts.We first tested whether local people in 15 rural communities in three Amazonian sites could accurately diagnose, before and after training, the pregnancy status of hunted pacas Cuniculus paca, which we use as our model. We then applied the results from these tests to correct reproductive status data of hunted specimens, voluntarily collected over 17 years (2002–2018) as part of a citizen-science project in one of our study sites. We ran generalized additive models to contrast these corrected reproductive rates with those obtained from the direct analysis of genitalia by researchers, and with indices describing game extraction levels (catch‐per‐unit‐effort, CPUE, and age structure of hunted individuals).Before training, interviewees correctly diagnosed pregnancy in 72.5% of tests, but after training, interviewees accurately diagnosed pregnancy in 88.2% of tests, with high improvements especially for earlier pregnancy stages. Monthly pregnancy rates determined by hunters and by researchers were similar. Reported annual pregnancy rates were negatively correlated with CPUE, and positively correlated with the percentage of immatures in the hunted population, in accordance with an expected density‐dependent response to variations in hunting levels.Synthesis and applications. We show that the voluntary diagnosis of game species' reproductive status by local people is a feasible method to obtain accurate life‐history parameters for hunted tropical species, and to assess hunting effects on game populations. Given that almost half of the protected areas in the world are co‐managed by local people, our results confirm the potential of integrating local communities in citizen-science initiatives to ensure faster, low‐cost and more accurate data collection for wildlife management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Women greatly contribute to fisheries worldwide, representing 47% of the global fisheries' workforce. Yet female fishing roles often go unrecognized. In the Brazilian Amazonia, arapaima (Arapaima spp.) co-management, which began in the 2000s, may represent a significant change in this scenario. To assess the impact of arapaima co-management on women recognition in fisheries, we conducted a comprehensive assessment at 54 fishing communities, across ~1500-km of a major Amazonian river. Based on quantitative data from interviews with 143 women, we show that arapaima co-management represented an innovative source of female income from fisheries and an unprecedented recognition of women participation in fishing activities. In communities with arapaima co-management, median female fishing revenue was US$ 215/yr and mean probability of women earning income from fisheries was 77%, a marked difference from the virtually non-existent female fishing income at communities without arapaima co-management (median = US$ 0; mean probability = 8%). Although many women often participate in commercial fisheries, arapaima co-management has been the only source of fishing income for most of them. We discuss the potentials, limitations and broad implications of our case study, which can serve as a model to be adapted to other extractive economies worldwide seeking to enhance gender equity. • Women often do not receive financial rewards for their participation in fisheries. • Arapaima co-management represents an innovative source of female fishing income. • Providing revenues directly to women will likely result in positive social changes. • The scheme can serve as a model to enhance gender equity in extractive economies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Civil wars often coincide with global biodiversity hotspots and have plagued the everyday reality of many countries throughout human history. However, how do civil wars affect wildlife populations? Are these impacts the same in savannah and forest environments? How persistent are the post-war consequences on wildlife populations within and outside conflict zones? Long-term monitoring programs in war zones, which could answer these questions, are virtually nonexistent, not least due to the risks researchers are exposed to. In this context, only a few methodologies can provide data on wild populations during war conflicts. We used local ecological knowledge to assess the main consequences of a prolonged civil war (1975–2002) in Southwestern Africa on forest and savannah mammals. The post-war abundance in 20 of 26 (77%) mammal species considered in this study was lower in open savannah compared to the closed-canopy forest environments, with some species experiencing a decline of up to 80% of their pre-war baseline abundance. Large-bodied mammals were preferred targets and had been overhunted, but as their populations became increasingly depleted, the size structure of prey species gradually shifted towards smaller-bodied species. Finally, we present a general flow diagram of how civil wars in low-governance countries can have both positive and negative impacts on native wildlife populations at different scales of space and time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The community‐based management of Arapaima gigas for sustainable commercial use allows that wild fish legally harvested in the Brazilian Amazon supply the demand for exotic leather in the US, supporting the conservation of the forest and providing income for fishers communities if based in fair‐trade. We provide a more optimistic view than Heinrich et al. (2019) on the effects of international trade of arapaima leather in the conservation of the species in Brazil. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought humanity's strained relationship with nature into sharp focus, with calls for cessation of wild meat trade and consumption, to protect public health and biodiversity. 1,2 However, the importance of wild meat for human nutrition, and its tele-couplings to other food production systems, mean that the complete removal of wild meat from diets and markets would represent a shock to global food systems. 3–6 The negative consequences of this shock deserve consideration in policy responses to COVID-19. We demonstrate that the sudden policy-induced loss of wild meat from food systems could have negative consequences for people and nature. Loss of wild meat from diets could lead to food insecurity, due to reduced protein and nutrition, and/or drive land-use change to replace lost nutrients with animal agriculture, which could increase biodiversity loss and emerging infectious disease risk. We estimate the magnitude of these consequences for 83 countries, and qualitatively explore how prohibitions might play out in 10 case study places. Results indicate that risks are greatest for food-insecure developing nations, where feasible, sustainable, and socially desirable wild meat alternatives are limited. Some developed nations would also face shocks, and while high-capacity food systems could more easily adapt, certain places and people would be disproportionately impacted. We urge decision-makers to consider potential unintended consequences of policy-induced shocks amidst COVID-19; and take holistic approach to wildlife trade interventions, which acknowledge the interconnectivity of global food systems and nature, and include safeguards for vulnerable people. [Display omitted] • 15 countries identified as at risk of food insecurity from wild meat prohibitions • Extra agricultural land to replace wild meat protein with livestock is ∼124,000 km2 • This land-use change could drive >260 species toward extinction, globally • Context-specific factors moderate risks of food insecurity and biodiversity loss The COVID-19 pandemic has led to calls to prohibit wild meat consumption, to protect public health and biodiversity. However, Booth et al. demonstrate that the sudden removal of wild meat from food systems could negatively impact people and nature. Wildlife trade policy interventions need to consider tele-couplings between food systems and nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When effectively managed, Protected Areas (PAs) are capable of generating multiple forms of value, both tangible and intangible, for individuals and institutions. However, the value-generating potential of many PAs may be going unrecognized and underutilized due to a limited view of management objectives as codified within the parks' Management Plan. Here, we test the hypothesis that PAs are undervalued by evaluating the degree to which Management Plans from four different Brazilian designations (National Parks, Ecological Stations, Environmental Protected Areas and National Forests) recognize different categories of nature-related assets (entities, attributes and relationships that can be protected, managed and/or invested in to generate forms of value). Based on a recently proposed PA Asset Framework, we identify what assets are mentioned by Management Plans and what assets are under-represented. Our results indicate that Human and Cultural assets are the least represented of the major asset classes (Biophysical, Human, Infrastructural, Institutional and Cultural) and that many asset sub-categories that should reasonably be expected to be present in Management Plans are frequently not mentioned. Assets that are not being considered in Management Plans are, by extension, less likely to be managed and/or invested in. Given the strong similarities between PA Management Plans in different countries, these results probably reflect a general trend. A simple way to ensure that PAs maximize the value generating potential (within the context of their designation) would be to survey their assets and generate a 'PA Asset Management and Investment Plan' to supplement and support existing planning documentation. • Key natural assets are undervalued in Brazilian Management Plans. • Recognizing key assets can be a way to strengthen the management of Protected Areas. • Human and cultural assets are relatively less represented in Management Plans. • The absence of assets indicating that potential values are may be being overlooked. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]