Apresentação

ENGLISH – PORTUGUESE EQUIVALENTS OF FORESTRY AND CONSERVATION TERMS John K. Francis (*)
FOREWORD Signs of deterioration of the global environment and threatened destruction of the vast Amazon forest have stirred a call for action. Conservationists have always been concerned about the tropical forests; now funds are being made available for increased work on problems in the region. Brazilian scientists struggle to communicate with colleagues in the rest of the world while scientists from other areas are discovering that to work effectively in Brazil, one must speak Portuguese. One must also be able to read Portuguese to benefit from the local technical literature. English-speaking scientists have not prepared themselves particularly well in other languages. It was presumed by many that anything important would be published in English, or at least it would be translated into English. Also, Portuguese is generally given a priority somewhat below Spanish, French, and German in forestry and conservation literature, thus few scientists make an effort to study it. Portuguese-speaking scientists and conservationists, on the other hand, are handicapped by limited literature in their own language and a technical vocabulary that is not yet fully developed. The International Institute of Tropical Forestry of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service has been mandated to carry on cooperative research and technology transfer in the Amazon Basin. This dictionary of forestry and conservation terms has been prepared to aid in communications with our Portuguesespeaking colleagues and for the benefit of others facing similar language barriers. Forestry and conservation are very broad fields, which include many subfields that have large and detailed vocabularies. I have attempted to collect the most common and useful of these terms and determine the equivalencies in English and Portuguese. In many cases, several terms denote the same concept. They will be listed separately,