Carlos A. Peres

Born in Belém, Pará, Brazil, Carlos Peres was exposed to Amazonian natural history from age six and never looked back. His father's ~5,000-hectare forest landholding in Acará, Eastern Amazonia, 98% of which consisted of undisturbed primary forest, became a formative playground. For the last 40 years he has been studying wildlife community ecology in Amazonian forests, the population ecology of key neotropical forest resource populations, the biological criteria for designing nature reserves, and community-based integrated conservation-development frameworks. He currently co-directs four ecology and conservation research programs throughout Amazonian forests, including the ecology of key timber and non-timber forest resources; patterns of vertebrate assemblage structure in Amazonian forests; the biological dynamics of hyper-disturbed and fragmented forest landscapes, and the biodiversity consequences of land-use change. He has also worked in Mesoamerica and other neotropical biomes, including the Atlantic Forest, the Caatinga, the Cerrado and the Pantanal wetlands. He currently leads the largest ever multi-taxa program of quantitative biodiversity inventories in any tropical forest region. He has published over 470 papers on neotropical forest ecology and conservation at scales ranging from populations to landscapes, and to entire continents. This work has been cited over 63,000 times. He has worked in over 120 forest sites in six of the nine Amazonian countries, and has supervised the postgraduate work of over 140 students from 22 countries of South America, Africa, South-East Asia, Europe and North America. In 1995, he received the "Biodiversity Conservation Leadership Prize Award" from the Bay and Paul Foundation (USA), and in 2000 he was elected an "Environmentalist Leader for the New Millennium" by Time Magazine and CNN Network. In 2023, he won the inaugural Frontiers Planet Prize as “International Champion”. He is a Professor of Tropical Conservation Ecology at the School of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia (UK) and the lifetime Science Director of a non-profit conservation NGO in the Amazon (Instituto Juruá), which he co-founded and co-directs. He splits his time between Norfolk, UK and Amazonian forest sites, and serves as policy adviser to the Brazilian government on conservation and development issues in the Brazilian Amazon. He is currently the Edward Bass Distinguished Visiting Environmental Scholar at Yale University (until July 2026).