Carlos A. Peres

Carlos Augusto Peres (Portuguese: [ˈkahluz ɐwˈɡuʃtu ˈpɛɾiʃ]) (born 1963) is a Brazilian field biologist and conservation biologist who works in the Amazon and other neotropical forest regions on questions involving wildlife and biological conservation. His research interests are in the large-scale patterns of large-bodied vertebrate diversity and abundance in Amazonian forests; the effects of different forms on human disturbance, including hunting, habitat fragmentation and wildfires, on Amazonian forest vertebrates; and reserve selection and design criteria in relation to regional gradients of biodiversity value and implementation costs. He currently co-directs three research programs on natural resource management in eastern, southern and western Amazonia focusing on the ecology of natural and heavily modified landscapes and their role in the retention of biodiversity.

Peres was born in Belém, Brazil, and was exposed to Amazonian natural history from early childhood on his father's ranch in eastern Pará, which consisted largely of primary forest. Since 1982 has been studying wildlife community ecology in Amazonian forests, the biological criteria for designing nature reserves, and the population ecology of resource management within and outside protected areas. He currently is involved in four conservation ecology research programs in different parts of Amazonia. He has published over 200 papers on neotropical forest ecology and conservation at scales ranging from single populations to entire regional landscapes.

From 1991-1992 he was a post-doctoral fellow at the Department of Zoology, Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi in Belem, and in 1993 he was a post-doctoral Fellow at the Center for Tropical Conservation at Duke University in the US. From 1993-1995 he was an assistant professor at the Department of Ecology of University of São Paulo in Brazil. From 1995-1996 he was a senior research associate at the Centre for Social and Economic Research on the Global Environment (CSERGE) at the University of East Anglia (UEA) in the United Kingdom, and from 1996-2002 he was a lecturer at the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia. In 2002 he became a Reader at UEA, and in 2008 was made Professor of Conservation Biology at the university. He was the co-editor with W.F. Laurance of the 206 book Emerging Threats to Tropical Forests. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, ISBN 978-0226470221. He currently divides his time between Norwich and fieldwork in the Brazilian Amazon.

In 1995 he received a "Biodiversity Conservation Leadership Award" and in 2000 he was named an "Environmentalist Leader for the New Millennium" by Time Magazine.