A lot of places around the world as well as the Amazon have a great amount of aquatic and arboreal life.

Amazon fish species at risk if fires destroy river habitat

This year’s unusually severe fires in the Amazon have not only attracted widespread international attention, but also illuminated the effects of mounting deforestation in the region, from evaporating rains to rising carbon dioxide emissions. Yet one effect of forest loss in the Amazon has largely been ignored: how it influences the river system and the fish living in it.

There are few places in the world where aquatic and arboreal life are brought together as closely as they are in the Amazon. While the rainforest is home to the world’s largest river (by volume of water) and 1,700 tributaries, about one-sixth of the basin is also made up of largely forest-covered wetlands that flood for long periods each year and support the commercially most important fish in the region.

Although still pristine in much of the Amazon, the floodplain forests have in recent decades been heavily damaged in some parts of the basin, especially in the eastern lowlands of Brazil. Now, the threat to their survival — and the fish that rely on them — may be growing more intense because of increasing deforestation and fire, researchers say, warning that further degradation of the flooded forests could fundamentally alter the Amazon’s aquatic ecosystem.