Healthy forests safeguard traditional wild meat food systems in Amazonia.

ABSTRACT: Amazonia is the largest¹ and the most species-rich tropical forest region on Earth², where hundreds of Indigenous cultures and thousands of animal species have interacted over millennia^3,4. Although Amazonia offers a unique context to appraise the value of wildlife as a source of food to millions of rural inhabitants, the diversity, geographic extent, volumes and nutritional value of harvested wild meat are unknown. Here, leveraging a dataset comprising 447,438 animals hunted across 625 rural localities, we estimate an annual extraction of 0.57 Mt of undressed animal biomass across Amazonia, equivalent to 0.34 Mt of edible wild meat. Just 20 out of 174 taxa account for 72% of all animals hunted and 84% of the overall biomass extracted. We show that this amo

SUBMITTER: Antunes AP 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12711560 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature