Beyond the Footprints on the Forest: Human influence on the construction of tropical and subtropical forests in Brazil – Nivaldo Peroni, Andrea Pieroni (discussant)

Brazil is a country with high biological and cultural diversity, but there is little understanding of its forests being the result of interaction between these two components. A general idea still persists nowadays that the rainforests are largely pristine, and that the forests we see today result only from ecological factors, uninfluenced by human action. I will present results from my research and from other colleagues in both the Amazon and Atlantic forests. These results show how long-term human influences since the beginning of the Holocene could have led to biocultural processes that were and continue to be responsible for building the forest landscapes and foodscapes. Among these biocultural processes, the use and management of plants for food are central elements. The implications of these results force us to rethink the processes of plant and landscape domestication in South America, the generation of agrobiodiversity, indigenous protagonism and rights and scientific decolonization (see the attachment).

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