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Rural-urban migration and land abandonment can increase secondary forest coverage, which is predicted to alleviate harvesting pressure on vulnerable primary forest species. However, rural depopulation could threaten the conservation and development paradigm of sustainable resource use within inhabited reserves. This thesis examines 1) ruralurban migration in eight roadless regions of the central Brazilian Amazon, and 2) tests assumptions regarding the value of secondary forests for subsistence hunting in a partly deforested landscape of eastern Amazonia. Within central Amazonia, rural populations were clustered and growing within 300 km of towns whereas river headwaters have been largely abandoned. Living in remote upstream locations was costly, despite an abundance of natural resources. Upstream settlements were isolated from urban centres and were smaller, subject to costly trade exchange, and generally lacked schools and healthcare. The lack of education was the principal motive for ongoing out-migration from remote headwaters. Results show that interview data, spatial analysis and censuses of human populations can be used for temporal monitoring of vulnerable species across broad spatial scales. Within the eastern Amazon, research showed that secondary forests do not offer a panacea for over-hunting of primary forest wildlife. Hunters with access to both primary and successional habitats preferred to hunt in primary forest, probably because of good visibility, predictable prey distributions and high availability of other non-timber forest products. The availability of large areas of secondary forests failed to buffer hunting pressure in primary forest, as several primary forest species continued to be overhunted. Secondary forests alone are unlikely to support sustainable hunting across the Amazon as they may provide just 2% of the required protein intake of rural smallholders. This thesis concludes that failing to consider the diverse factors influencing spatial decision-making by rural people undermines the potential contribution of non-timber resource use to conserving tropical forests.