André da Silva watches an adult caiman in an aquarium in the middle of Bosque da Ciência, an open-air park in Manaus, the gateway to Brazil’s Amazon rainforest.
Mr Da Silva and his family are among people visiting the park for a small fee on a scorching hot and very humid October day when it first opened after it was closed due to efforts to curb the spread of Covid.
“I love coming here to see the wildlife,” he said. I in Portuguese through an interpreter at Bosque da Ciência.
“I feel like I’m in the middle of the Amazon rainforest.”
Bosque da Ciência, with an area of about 13 hectares, was created in April 1995 by the National Institute of Amazonian Research (INPA). The open-air park offers scientists the opportunity to share their research and educate locals and tourists. It also houses a museum where people can learn about wildlife and native trees in the Amazon rainforest through images including video, audio and art.
Manaus, where the park is located, is the capital and largest city of the Brazilian state of Amazonas. It contains a dense forest full of various tree species, including the tanimbuca, which plays a key role in absorbing carbon emissions from around the world and reducing the causes of climate change.
Bosque da Ciencia is also home to several Amazonian wildlife, from the asu alligator to monkeys, the endangered Amazonian manatee, caimans, electric eels and albino turtles.
Some of the park’s tree and animal species are threatened with extinction in the true Amazon rainforest due to logging, mining, and land degradation, threatening biodiversity in the world’s largest rainforest. The park plays an important role in the conservation of some species, and dangerous animals are kept in reserves so that they do not harm visitors.
Deforestation has increased under former President Jair Bolsonaro, who was defeated by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in late October elections. Lula, who pledged to protect the Amazon rainforest during his campaign, revived a $1.2 billion fund to protect the rainforest after it was abandoned by the Bolsonaro regime.
Rita Mesquita, manager of Bosque da Ciência, said her team is breeding some of the animals in the park and returning them to the real Amazon rainforest so they don’t go extinct.
“This is where we educate people about the Amazon rainforest,” said Ms Mesquita. I at Camp 41 of the Amazon Biodiversity Center, a research reserve north of Manaus in Brazil, where the forest is still intact.
“We encourage them, especially children, to protect the Amazon rainforest. This helps raise awareness of the importance of the Amazon rainforest, not only to Brazil, but to the rest of the world.”
Prior to the pandemic, Bosque da Ciência received more than 100,000 visitors a year, according to Ms Mesquita. It is staffed mainly by volunteers, including young scientists and researchers, but the funding problem remains.
“Sometimes we are forced to limit the number of visitors due to security issues due to lack of resources. If we hire too many people, we won’t be able to control them due to lack of staff,” says Ms Mekita.
She is now reaching out to relevant stakeholders to raise more funds so that the park can continue to showcase its unique flora and fauna to the thousands of visitors who visit each year.
Ms Mesquita says she is confident the number of visitors will increase to surpass the 100,000 a year the park saw in the pre-Covid-19 era.
“We’re getting closer to it,” she says.
The reporting for this story was supported by the United Nations Foundation.
Source: I News
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