We warmly invite you to join us at the Iracambi Rainforest Research Center in Brazil's Atlantic Forest, where you'll be able to follow environmental conservancy practices in the Brazilian Atlantic Rainforest. Together with local students, schoolkids, community members, international students, and volunteers: together we're Saving Forests and Changing Lives and we'd love you to be part of it! Registering as much as possible all these incredible actions and efforts done by different people, from different parts of the world.
Here at Iracambi we’ve been Saving Forests and Changing Lives for over twenty years! During that time, we’ve planted over 140, 000 native forest trees, founded the first program of environmental education in the region, set up the first web-based GIS, created thousands of acres of protected areas, hosted 2000 international students and volunteers from 70 countries, and impacted the lives of thousands of people in the Serra do Brigadeiro mountains.
So what does Iracambi do? We're working with local farmers whereby together we plant native and productive tree species to increase farm incomes, restore degraded soils, protect water sources, and increase habitat for biodiversity. This involves a host of different practical tasks, starting with everyone's favorite place on campus: the forest nursery. Creating and maintaining a healthy supply of young trees requires a lot of work - collecting seeds in the forest, preparing and caring for young seedlings, planting them out at the right time of year, and monitoring and recording our progress.
Do you remember that we're talking about changing lives? Here's where we work with local farmers, school kids, volunteers, and visitors, hosting visits, running workshops and outreach programs designed to raise awareness of the important issues of how to live sustainably, and how to encourage more and more people to join us in the exciting task of protecting one of the most important forests in the world.
So we always need good visual content that tells the story of the forest, its inhabitants, challenges, and achievements!
We invite you to participate in and record our ongoing projects and encourage you to take responsibility for your work, experience, lifestyle, and for your fellow Iracambistas. If you have a brilliant idea for something we could or ought to do, let’s see if we can do it!
The Research Center is located on a working farm, which includes a large area of native forest as well as tree crops. There are rivers, mountains, forest trails, and a welcoming local community and its traditional practices.
Remember, your job is to be a voice for the forest and all the forest activities by telling stories. Tell people everywhere about this amazing rainforest where you'll be living. Why it's so important. Why we need to inspire people everywhere to get involved. So you need to be a part of it, seeing everything that's going on here. Getting involved in everything. Taking photos. Recording the sounds of the forest. Creating amazing content that we can share with the world. So you'll be an artist. A marketer. A sound engineer. A photographer, maybe. An editor. A graphic artist. You will be the voice of the forest. Of all its fauna and flora.
What an exciting assignment is! As a visual artist, you could be getting up in the dark to climb a mountain and film the sun rising over the misty valleys.
If you're up for doing your part, we invite you to join us. Together we'll wrestle with the challenges, seek solutions, and put them to work.
A little background
The Atlantic Forest stretches from the northeastern to the southern regions of Brazil northern Argentina and southeastern Paraguay. Five hundred years ago, it covered approximately 330 million acres, but today only 7- 8% remains. And we are determined to protect and restore what we can. These forests harbor an extraordinarily high rate of biodiversity, including 2,200 species of birds, mammals, reptiles, and amphibians - 5% of all the vertebrates on earth. And new species are still being discovered!
Iracambi is adjacent to the Serra do Brigadeiro State Park, one of the highest conservation priority areas in the state, and home to the largest population of the woolly spider monkey Brachyteles hypoxanthus – the most endangered and arguably the most adorable of the New World Primates.
