Key Takeaways from Episode 4 of Rewilding Amazonia

• Satellites are doing more than watching. Technology like high-resolution satellite imagery does more than track destruction—it helps indigenous communities legally prove their presence in territories they’ve called home for generations. Maps are legal instruments, and without them, land can be lost through paperwork rather than force.
• 800 observations, one river. On the Río Puré alone, satellite monitoring has logged more than 800 illegal mining barge sightings over five years. The invasion of protected Amazonian territories is organized, financially driven by global gold prices, and deeply tied to criminal networks that have diversified from drug trafficking.
• When you can’t go there, you watch from above. In Venezuela, where speaking out can get you killed and physical access is controlled by armed groups, SOSOrinoco built an entire documentation network using satellite imagery, open-source intelligence, and anonymous witnesses. The result: legally actionable evidence of over 1,000 hectares of illegal mines inside a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
• The balloon effect is real. When one country cracks down on illegal mining, criminal networks don’t disappear—they relocate across the border. Effective Amazon protection requires coordinated, cross-border action between governments, civil society, and indigenous communities.
• You can read a forest’s health in its insects. Two to three praying mantis species signals a degraded forest. Twenty to thirty signals a healthy one. Projeto Mantis is building the first long-term mantis monitoring baseline in tropical rainforests in Brazil—data that reforestation scientists will rely on for generations.
• The Amazon communicates in ways we can’t see. Under UV light, countless organisms in the Amazon biofluoresce. A forest monitored only through human eyes is a forest we’re misreading. The more tools we develop to see what’s really there, the better equipped we are to protect it.

Seeing the Invisible

There used to be a guard post called Porto Franco on the Colombian-Brazilian border, named after a researcher who spent his life protecting the isolated indigenous peoples of that region. It was one of the most remote monitoring stations in the Colombian Amazon, staffed by rangers whose job was to watch, document, and witness what was happening on the Río Puré, in a national park that exists to protect two groups of people who have never made contact with the outside world. About six years ago, armed groups told the park staff to leave, and within months of being abandoned, Porto Franco was burned to the ground.

Brian: “I think it shows that, you know, with modern technology, with all these satellite imagery, the data that’s being created, we can see almost everything that’s happening in the Amazon, whether it be illegal mining, illegal logging, agricultural expansion.”

From orbit, the satellites kept watching. And what they saw was alarming—hundreds of illegal mining barges pushing deeper into protected territory, with no one left on the ground to stop them.

This is Episode 4 of Rewilding Amazonia by Rewildology. I’m Brooke Mitchell.

Let’s travel into space.

Satellite Mapping & Monitoring: Brian Hettler & Amazon Conservation Team

Watching from Orbit

Brian Hettler has spent fourteen years watching the Amazon from orbit. As Director of Mapping at the Amazon Conservation Team, his job is to monitor a forest the size of a continent — systematically, persistently, at a scale no human presence on the ground could match. And the thing that has consumed most of his attention in recent years: illegal mining.

Brian: “At ACT we use remote technologies like satellite imagery and data sets derived from satellite imagery to help monitor some of the threats affecting the Amazon rainforest. We’ve done a lot of regional mapping looking at threats like oil extraction, logging, mining, road construction — all these things that are leading to forest loss across the region. One topic that we’ve really keyed in on is illegal mining. We’ve seen rivers near the border with Colombia and Brazil just really be transformed in the past few years by the influx of mining activity.”

That satellite access happened through a strategic partnership.

Brian: “Without any National Park staff there — the monitors that had been there previously, had to evacuate due to the security situation — we had to depend entirely on remote technologies. Fortunately we have a really important partner at ACT, a company called Vantor, a commercial provider of satellite imagery. We’ve been using this high resolution satellite imagery — 50 centimeter to 30 centimeter resolution. Very detailed imagery.”

ACT has been programming satellites to prioritize imagery over specific areas of concern for about ten years—and on the Río Puré, that work has logged more than 800 observations of illegal mining barges over the last five years.

Mapping as Legal Defense

But tracking destruction is only one thing satellites can do. The same technology also helps communities prove they were always there.

Indigenous communities and scientists across the region have used participatory mapping exercises—laying satellite images flat on a table, placing a sheet of plastic over them, and community members drawing directly onto the images — to document land use, place names, sacred sites, migration routes, and the locations of resources their families have tracked for generations. These maps aren’t just cultural records. In the legal systems of most Amazonian nations, a community that cannot prove its presence in a territory—with documented land use and GPS-measured boundaries—runs the risk of losing their territory. Not through conquest, but through paperwork.

ACT has helped title more than 2.7 million hectares of indigenous territory in Colombia alone. But titling only holds as long as someone with the political will to enforce it is paying attention.

Brian: “At the end of the day, it comes down to some political willingness. Even if we are able to show through these cultural maps that there’s a long history of these communities being in these territories — these communities have been working on these land requests sometimes for twenty to thirty years. They’re highly organized, highly committed. And even with all of that and the support that we offer, at the end it does come down to political willingness.”

The Invasion and the Financial Architecture Behind It

On the rivers Brian watches, political willingness has a very specific adversary. He describes what he sees in the satellite imagery with the precision of someone who has been counting these things for a long time.

Brian: “The area we’ve been looking at has been most affected by informal alluvial or river mining. These are barges that move up and down rivers — they have the ability to suck up the sediment off the bottom of the river, they’ll have a big crane on the front to start taking down trees and cut away at the riverbank. They take the sediment out of the river bottom, separate out the gold from the sediment using mercury in a sluice box on the boat, and then dump all the residue that’s not the gold — including all the toxic mercury — back into the rivers. It’s probably something like a gold rush: they hear about people hitting in a certain region and there can be just a huge invasion of these mining barges.”

And behind those barges is a financial architecture that Brian describes with a kind of weariness, because this isn’t just environmental crime. It’s organized crime with a commodity.

Brian: “These armed groups have historically made a lot of money from drug trafficking, and now more recently they’re getting involved in illegal gold mining as well — kind of diversifying their portfolio. The mining sector in South America is poorly monitored, and it’s an opportunity for laundering money made from the drug trade. And a lot of this is driven by the skyrocketing price of gold worldwide. All this economic uncertainty in the world is leading to higher prices of gold, driving more people to do illegal gold mining in the Amazon. This is not a supply side problem — it’s a demand problem. But of course it always gets blamed on these South American countries.”

A 2024 study published in Nature Communications put numbers to what Brian is describing: by 2022, illegal mining in the Brazilian Amazon had expanded to more than twelve times the area it occupied in 1985, with 77 percent of detected operations showing clear signs of illegality. The global gold price nearly doubled between 2018 and 2023, and the invasion tracked it almost perfectly. But even at that scale, satellites keep capturing every new barge, and people like Brian are turning those images into evidence that can finally be used.

On the Río Puré, that satellite intelligence feeds into AARIMO—a local coalition of organizations working to coordinate the response on the ground. Information generated from that imagery has helped Colombian military authorities better understand illegal mining trends and strengthen environmental enforcement actions, leading to the destruction of approximately a hundred barges, including fourteen in a single operation this past September. It is slow and difficult work conducted against illegal miners that keep coming back as long as gold stays expensive.

Brian: “We can see almost everything that’s happening in the Amazon — whether it be illegal mining, illegal logging, agricultural expansion. We can see all this happening. It’s just about getting local decision makers and stakeholders to act on this information, and help enforce the law in these remote areas.”

The satellites keep watching. And occasionally, amid the barge counts and the deforestation alerts, Brian finds something else.

Brian: “It’s not only monitoring threats — we also remotely monitor some of the settlement patterns of these isolated indigenous groups. And it gives me some hope to see them continuing to thrive. Occasionally we’ll see a new house being built in a new area, which gives an idea that they’re expanding and hopefully doing well. I think what inspires me and gives me hope is the resilience I see in the indigenous partners that we work with — a lot of these groups have been through so much over the past hundreds of years, and just to see how they still work to connect to nature, to preserve nature — often doing it with a smile on their face, and a lot of grace and wisdom.”

A new house, visible from space—a tiny clearing found only because someone sat down and carefully looked at what the satellites captured. Fourteen years of showing up, one frame at a time.

Discovering Destruction: Cristina Vollmer Burelli & SOSOrinoco

A UNESCO World Heritage Site Under Siege

Canaima National Park in southeastern Venezuela is one of the most extraordinary places on Earth. It spans three million hectares and is famous for its dramatic tepuis—ancient table-top mountains with sheer cliffs and flat summits that rise like islands above the forest. These unique formations cover about sixty-five percent of the park, creating a lost-world landscape full of endemic species and breathtaking scenery. Among the highlights is Angel Falls, the world’s highest uninterrupted waterfall, plunging 979 meters from one of the tepuis. The park was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1994, and for much of the twentieth century, Venezuela was recognized as a leader in conservation across South America.

In 2018, Cristina Vollmer Burelli heard rumors that the Chinese were mining inside the park.

Cristina: “I reached out to UNESCO to find out what they knew — was this on their radar screen? And they didn’t know anything. They just said, we just get whatever the Maduro regime tells us. So I started calling people in Venezuela, experts who knew a little bit about what was going on. And the first thing I realized was that there was a lot of fear and hesitation when it came to talking factually about what was going on. But what I picked up was that, yeah, there was illegal mining happening. So UNESCO said we need a technical report, but it has to come from people who are on the ground. I reached out to experts in Venezuela and they said they would only be willing to do it if they could do it anonymously. UNESCO said, fine, as long as it’s technical, we can accept a report from an anonymous group. So we went ahead and wrote the first report on illegal mining in Canaima. And what we found was horrific. Over a thousand hectares of illegal gold mines, over thirty separate mining sections throughout the park. And nobody really knew about this. We were able to report on this because Maxar gave us very high resolution satellite images — because it’s impossible to go there and see these mines. The only way to measure, geo-reference, and prove that these mines exist is with satellite imagery.”

Building SOSOrinoco

That first report became the foundation of SOSOrinoco, the organization Cristina has led since 2018. It now has between fifteen and twenty-five people—journalists, scientists, witnesses, and indigenous leaders—all operating under code names and anonymously. In Venezuela, speaking out against what’s happening in the southern Amazon can get you killed. Physical access to most of these areas is controlled entirely by armed criminal groups. The only way in is from orbit.

Cristina: “The beauty of open source intelligence is that we actively use it to document factually what’s going on on the ground. Everything from high resolution satellite images — we scour the internet for information. There are indigenous people, people living in communities, who post information, who send information. They say, there’s a dredge, or there are five new dredges on the river. We’ve become very good and very efficient at doing a very systematic search on information that’s out there. We have people on the ground who have become witnesses and give us information. A lot of the team members of SOSOrinoco are experts in their fields. They know the country very well, many of them having worked on the ground in previous administrations. And with that knowledge and whatever information we’re able to get from witnesses, from social media, from satellite images, you can deduce a lot.”

What they’re deducing and documenting has a scale that takes a moment to absorb. In twenty-five years, southern Venezuela has lost 945,000 hectares of forest. Thirty-seven percent of that loss has occurred in the last decade alone, and it is accelerating. At the current rate, the destruction is running at roughly 75,000 hectares per year, inside what is supposed to be one of the most protected landscapes in the hemisphere.

AI, Educated Eyes, and the Limits of Automation

Cristina is careful about where AI fits into this picture.

Cristina: “There’s a lot of talk about monitoring deforestation via AI — this is the big new thing, and particularly in Amazonia. You have a lot of organizations mapping deforestation and mining with AI. But that’s confusing without an educated eye, because sometimes you see deforestation and it’s not manmade. It could be something geological in that particular area, or maybe it’s an indigenous community with their traditional practices and it’s not a mining area. AI is good, obviously, but you need an educated eye to differentiate between all the different types and origins of deforestation.”

The educated eye, in SOSOrinoco’s case, belongs to people who can’t safely identify themselves. Anonymity shapes everything about how the organization works — and it reveals something important about what monitoring actually requires in the most dangerous parts of the Amazon. Satellites can spot, and AI can flag. But making sense of what you’re seeing, and staying alive long enough to report on it, requires human knowledge that can’t be automated.

The Lula Balloon Effect

There’s a much darker layer to Cristina’s story that we’ll return to in Episode 6. But here is one thing she said about why criminal networks thrive specifically at the borders between countries, because it connects directly to everything in this episode about the limits of monitoring from any single vantage point.

Cristina: “The Amazonian biome doesn’t really have any borders or frontiers — they’re all political. Flora, fauna, even indigenous groups live across the borders. The Yanomami, part of them live in Brazil, part in Venezuela — they consider themselves brothers, they don’t see that political border. In the same way, criminal groups don’t see borders either. The Amazon biome is one, and they work seamlessly across it. Borders tend to be the most remote areas — vulnerable, difficult to patrol, and that’s where indigenous people live. So that is why criminal organizations go to these places — they know they can run freely. When Lula came to power, within days he was there, helicopters bombing illegal mines, destroying planes that belonged to the garimpeiros. What did those garimpeiros do? They just ran over the border into Venezuela, where they knew they could do good business with the Venezuelan military authorities. Lula’s problem became our problem. I call it the Lula balloon effect — you pressure here and you push the balloon over the border and it’s somebody else’s problem. The only way to tackle this is by governments, civil society, and indigenous communities coming together across those borders.”

The balloon effect. One country cracks down, and the destruction simply relocates to wherever the monitoring is weakest and the armed groups are most entrenched. Which is exactly why the work of making the invisible visible—satellite by satellite, witness by witness, code name by code name—has to operate at the same scale as the problem it’s tracking.

We’ll hear the rest of Cristina’s story in Episode 6.

Invisible Islands: Leo Lanna & Projeto Mantis

A Chance Encounter on a Balcony

Leo Lanna is an entomologist, photographer, poet, and PhD researcher based in the Brazilian countryside, about three hours outside of Rio de Janeiro. He has spent the last ten years studying praying mantises in tropical rainforests, mostly at night. He did not set out to do this. He first studied business, then switched to biology, and was fully prepared to never think about insects.

Leo: “I remember my mother told me, okay, you can do a second graduation—just don’t go for insects. And I said, of course, who would ever go for insects? You have birds, you have whales, you have polar bears, you have jaguars. Who would go for insects? So I never thought about doing that. And then I found a praying mantis at the balcony of my parents’ home—and it was looking at my eyes. I’d never seen an insect that looked you so deeply.”

That mantis, encountered on a balcony in the same town where Leo now lives, launched what has become Projeto Mantis—a research organization run by Leo and his husband Lvcas, a graphic designer and visual artist. Together they’ve conducted expeditions across Brazil and into the Amazon, photographing, documenting, and studying praying mantises in some of the most biodiverse and least-surveyed forest patches of the Amazon. They have around twenty species in line for formal description—a painstaking process that, with just two people doing the work, takes considerable time for each one. In most of the places they go, up to a third of the species they find have never been named.

The Community Signal

But the reason Leo is in this episode isn’t just discovery. It’s what the mantises tell him about the health of everything around them.

Leo: “Once you cut down the forest, once you degrade the environment, it never comes back as it used to be in terms of insect diversity, because many of them are linked to that place in such a way that if you break that cycle, they’re not coming back — not easily, or not ever. A single mantis or a single species is not telling you anything about the health of the forest, but the community, the diversity of this group — that’s what tells us. I live in the countryside, but around me I only have eucalyptus plantation and pasture. I have two or three species appearing frequently. But what we expect for a rainforest in Brazil is around twenty to thirty. So if I go to an expedition in Amazonia and I find only ten species of praying mantises, probably something is going on with that area. If I find twenty or thirty, it tells me this area is very well preserved. They work like sharks for a reef — a single shark may not tell you about the reef’s health, but the community of sharks and their abundance does. The diversity of mantises you find, and how many you find, tells you about the health of the forest.”

Two to three species means degraded. Twenty to thirty means healthy. That’s a monitoring signal legible enough to act on—and one that required ten years of fieldwork across dozens of sites to establish. It also led Leo to a discovery that reframes how reforestation efforts should be evaluated: praying mantises, it turns out, are not wanderers.

Invisible Islands

Leo: “We had ideas from our long-term expeditions that some species tend to stay in the same place for a long time. During the pandemic I had the chance to observe specimens in my garden — some individuals stayed on the same plant for eight months. It’s an insect that is not randomly walking and hunting. It’s stationary. It lives there. We moved that idea to a reserve — a natural rainforest — and we found that some mantises stayed on the same leaf for over five months. Five months of thunderstorms, rainstorms, windstorms, possums and frogs and birds passing through. And you’re still on the same plant. There’s something going on. They’re not so random. What this tells us about monitoring and reforestation is that if they are loyal to a place and you cut down that area, then regenerate it — they’re not coming back so fast. If we feel a forest is missing this kind of fragment, we may have to reintroduce rather than wait. Because they seem loyal not just to a single plant, but to a single patch of forest. I call it the invisible islands that we don’t see. For us, it’s all rainforest. For them, that patch is an invisible island. Everything around it is ocean. And it’s living there. If you walk fifty meters away — same rainforest, everything connected, never cut down — you’re not finding that species anymore. Why? These invisible things that we don’t see are why we have to consider this data when we think about reforestation.”

Think about that—invisible islands. A one-centimeter mantis whose entire world is a single patch of trees—and whose presence or absence, multiplied across a community of thirty species, can tell you whether a forest is thriving or quietly failing. It’s a monitoring system that doesn’t require satellites or code names or commercial imagery partners. It requires going out at night, knowing what you’re looking for, and being willing to come back to the same place over and over.

The Rainforest at Night

Leo does most of his Amazon monitoring work in darkness, and he’ll tell you that’s not a limitation. It’s where the forest actually lives.

Leo: “Everything happens much more than in daylight — in the rainforest, nighttime is when it comes alive. After the sun goes down, everything becomes alive. All the most incredible shapes, colors, this endless diversity. You don’t know what you’re going to find. You’re going to see some species you’ll probably never see again. You will see stuff you never even imagined existed on Earth. It’s like a portal that you cross. It takes patience. It takes sensibility to be looking at things — something we’ve lost with our accelerated lives. You need to be open to that experience. And once you’re open and you go with someone who knows the area, you dive into the rainforest at night and you see things you’re never going to see anywhere else. I was afraid of the dark when I was young — I’m still a little afraid. It’s a prohibition in our fieldwork to talk about ghosts, because otherwise I wouldn’t go out there. And that’s my main work. But in the rainforest at night, I feel like I’m home.”

The Amazon Under UV Light

A few years ago, Leo and his team brought UV lights into the Amazon on a National Geographic Society grant and discovered something incredible.

Leo: “We documented over three hundred live organisms under UV light. And we actually found out that the Amazon under UV light shines in all colors. What seemed to be an exception was actually the rule. The only exception — the only things that didn’t have biofluorescence — were tarantulas. You shoot the light and the tarantula stays completely black, absorbing all the light, giving nothing back. But all the other animals were shining in different colors. We had no idea. Every night we went out, we were discovering something we had never expected.”

While the tarantulas remained dark, everything else lit up in a kaleidoscope of colors evolved for birds, amphibians, and other mantises. Leo’s point is that a forest monitored only through human eyes is a forest we’re fundamentally misreading. The Amazon is communicating constantly in registers we haven’t learned to listen to yet.

What Gives Him Hope

When I asked Leo what gives him hope after ten years of this work, he referenced a Brazilian film—I’m Still Here, which won the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film last year, about a woman who lost her husband to the dictatorship and kept fighting for decades anyway.

Leo: “What gives me hope is that I’m still here. And we are still here. There are many people like us, and we’re still here to keep going. Not just for future generations — we have a whole billion people still here now. So it’s for the present generations too. This world: I’m still here. A lot of people asked her — what gives you hope of finding your husband? It’s been thirty years. She was still there, fighting and living, still having the joy moments and still having the grief moments. As long as I’m here, I’m going to be talking to you, or whoever, the same way — trying to live it, trying to bring as much joy and beauty and wonder, and connecting people to these different worlds. I’ve been working with insects for ten years and I haven’t met a single person who closed the door after hearing what we have to say. People are open. I feel hope for people, because I know people can be good.”

Conclusion

Satellites, anonymous witnesses, and a researcher counting insects in the dark. What connects all three is something deceptively simple: you can’t protect what you can’t see. And these people have spent years—in some cases decades—bringing to light what was previously invisible.

The tools are working. The evidence is building. And that gives me genuine hope.

Remember at the beginning of this series where I said the Amazon is more than just a rainforest, it’s a force of nature? The Amazon is so big that it generates its own rainfall, regulates temperatures, and affects the planet’s weather patterns. What happens to the Amazon’s global influence as the forest comes under pressure? That’s where we’re headed next.

I’m Brooke Mitchell. See you in Episode 5.