For Applicants | Focus Areas | Brazil / Biodiversity in the Brazilian Amazon Applicant Resources Apply Application Process Eligibility Focus Areas Find a USG-Supported Partner Frequently Asked Questions Eligible Countries: Brazil Additional Criteria for Applicants: Please see Section VI of the Solicitation for General Eligibility requirements. Objectives: Brazil is home to 30 percent of the world’s tropical rainforests, including 60 percent of the Amazon, the largest and most bio-diverse tropical rainforest in the world. USAID works to strengthen biodiversity and conservation of natural resources in designated protected areas and indigenous lands in Brazil. PEER is seeking to support interdisciplinary research proposals that bridge the social and natural sciences that will advance knowledge on the efficacy of community-led environmental sustainability in the protected areas of the Brazilian Amazon. PEER may support research proposals that cross traditional disciplinary boundaries and address issues of sustainability through a systems approach, building bridges between academic inquiry, economic growth, and societal needs. A main goal of the program is to support research that would not fit neatly into a single disciplinary research program. Projects must have explicit biodiversity conservation objectives, with anticipated outcomes that positively affect biodiversity and ecosystem management in the Brazilian Amazon, especially on indigenous lands located in that region. Projects must respond to identified threats to biodiversity (e.g., deforestation, expansion of the agricultural frontier, and climate change) and propose conservation solutions for monitoring biodiversity through activities including, but not limited to, real-time data collection, watershed management, population genetics, and community engagement that will lead to improved natural resource management. Projects must also ensure that programmed activities involve and benefit both women and men and address the underlying, gender-based constraints to their full and equitable engagement. Research areas may include, but are not limited to: Community or ecosystem resilience, sustainability, or productivity Investigating climate change impacts (adaptation and mitigation) on Amazon biodiversity Ecological response to anthropogenic disturbances including climate change Carbon, nitrogen, and other biogeochemical cycles Rates of evolution Understanding multi-dimensional threats to biodiversity Improving the economic valuation of ecosystems Leveraging indigenous peoples’ traditional practices and knowledge to protect the Amazon’s unique biodiversity Informing environmental governance systems for improved biodiversity conservation Proposals should incorporate a broad array of concepts that underlie biodiversity research, such as: Complex adaptive systems theory Multi-scale processes The vulnerability, adaptive capacity, and resilience of coupled human-environment systems Emergent and pro-social behavior or other studies of behavior change In addition, a primary goal of the program is to address the largest unknowns related to biodiversity. Proposals seeking to advance science, engineering, and education to inform the societal actions needed for environmental and economic sustainability and sustainable human well-being while creating the necessary workforce to address these challenges or that have the potential to fill large gaps in our understanding of biodiversity are encouraged.