Silvio Marchini

Silvio Marchini

"In 1994 I graduated from the University of São Paulo, Brazil, with a Bachelors degree in Biological Sciences. Ever since then, I have been working in the Amazon, initially as a research assistant at the Biological Dynamics of Forest Fragments Project, in Manaus, where I later conducted research on the effects of forest fragmentation on herbivory, as part of my Masters degree in Ecology at the University of Missouri-Saint Louis, in the United States. I also lived in Belem as the Academic Director of the Amazon Resource Management and Human Ecology Program of the School for Internation Training (SIT). The work for SIT inspired me to create the Amazonarium, an innovative educational organization whose mission is to promote and facilitate visits to the Brazilian Amazon through support to educational activities. The main branch of Amazonarium is the Escola da Amazônia [1], which since 2002 has held, in partnership with Cristalino Ecological Foundation (FEC), immersion workshops in southern Amazon on ecology and conservation for students from Alta Floresta and urban centres of Brazil and abroad. Alongside this, I coordinated the Wildlife Conservation Society’s (WCS) Pantanal Conservation Program from 2002 to 2005."

• Winner of the 2007 Whitley Fund for Nature: Award Winners