We have been in lockdown, but deforestation has not

Edilson Consuelo de Oliveira has regained his sense of taste and smell, so he has finally been able to enjoy a plate of pirapitinga, his favorite fish in all the Amazon. Before contracting coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), Edilson had been in lockdown on a small farm outside of Rio Branco, the capital of Acre state in Brazil, but in early June a nephew came to visit from the city, bringing a dry cough. Edilson was hospitalized for only two days and felt ill for two weeks; since then he has been recovering back on the farm. It’s lucky for him and for the Amazon, because Edilson is a “super-mateiro,” or master woodsman, one of a handful in that vast region (see Fig. 1). Edilson is something of a taxonomic shaman, as he can name hundreds of species of Amazonian trees on sight and is familiar with several thousand more.Fig. 1. Although the pandemic has put much of nature at a distance, Douglas Daly ( Left ) asks what field-based researchers can be doing now, what should be done when it’s again safe to travel to study sites, and how to best train new cohorts of researchers and super-mateiros like Edilson de Oliveira ( Right ).Rarities like Edilson are highly sought after by researchers, forest concessions, and conservationists. That is because any valid effort to conserve or manage biodiverse tropical forests requires that we know their species composition. However, now that the pandemic has put much of nature at a distance, field-based biologists have had to take stock: What can we be doing now? What must we do when the coast is clearer and we can safely travel to our study sites once again? Most importantly, why must we never let up in our efforts to buttress conservation programs and train new cohorts of … [↵][1]1Email: ddaly{at}nybg.org. [1]: #xref-corresp-1-1