South of the Amazon, stretching into Bolivia and Paraguay, the Pantanal has seen months of unprecedented fires.
Fernando Tortato arrived in late July, hoping to get started on his regular monitoring work on jaguars in the Pantanal, an area of wetlands in Brazil that is the size of England. As he began to understand the scale of the disaster unfolding around him, he dropped his research and instead turned to fighting the wildfires.
“You’re always at the whim of the fire,” said Tortato, who works for Panthera, a global wild cat conservation organization. “Sometimes it’s light and you have time to manage it, to propose a strategy. But often the fire comes with wind and you have to flee.”
Over the next 40 days, he would fight a losing battle against the worst fires in the area’s history.
Located just south of the Amazon, stretching into Bolivia and Paraguay, the Pantanal has seen months of unprecedented blazes. Experts fear the sheer size of the destruction wrought on one of the world’s highest concentrations of rare species.
The Amazon's Lesser-Known Cousin Has Lost a Fifth of its Area to Wildfire This Year - VICE
Fernando Tortato arrived in late July, hoping to get started on his regular monitoring work on jaguars in the Pantanal, an area of wetlands in Brazil that is the size of England. As he began to understand the scale of the disaster unfolding around him, he dropped his research and instead turned to fighting the wildfires.
“You’re always at the whim of the fire,” said Tortato, who works for Panthera, a global wild cat conservation organization. “Sometimes it’s light and you have time to manage it, to propose a strategy. But often the fire comes with wind and you have to flee.”
Over the next 40 days, he would fight a losing battle against the worst fires in the area’s history.
Located just south of the Amazon, stretching into Bolivia and Paraguay, the Pantanal has seen months of unprecedented blazes. Experts fear the sheer size of the destruction wrought on one of the world’s highest concentrations of rare species.
The Amazon's Lesser-Known Cousin Has Lost a Fifth of its Area to Wildfire This Year - VICE