Capoeira is an Afro-Brazilian martial art that combines singing and percussion with dance, combat and street theatre. Two practitioners play a 'game' within a 'circle' formed by the musicians and other participants. Enslaved Africans and Creoles developed the practice in the port cities of late colonial and imperial Brazil. It survived initial harsh repression until being recognised as a national sport and tradition in the twentieth century. Two competing styles were responsible for its modernisation in the 1930s-50s. They merged during the following decades into the current mainstream 'Contemporary' style, now taught and played around the world. The capoeira circle and the knowledge of capoeira teachers ('masters') were recognised by the Brazilian government as integral to the nation's intangible cultural heritage in 2008, and by UNESCO in 2014. The project aims to better understand the emergence of this Contemporary Capoeira by gathering material from different sources. It will conduct interviews with 40 surviving capoeira masters from the first and second generations, responsible for the development and expansion of the new, modernised style of capoeira during the 1950s-70s in 'Greater Rio de Janeiro' - which includes not only the city centre, but also its poorer suburbs and its marginalised periphery. The project will also systematically collect further material from local sound, image and newspaper archives to complement and corroborate these testimonies. With the help of some well-known and respected capoeira masters, who will act as project consultants, it will furthermore encourage the local capoeira community to donate materials such as old interviews or photographs. The collected material will be organised and stored in digital format on servers in Essex and Rio de Janeiro, in close collaboration with our project partner, the Laboratory of Oral History and Image at the Federal Fluminense University. The advanced age of the masters to be interviewed, and the absence of a coherent plan to rescue these crucial testimonies for capoeira history in the current political and financial crisis in Rio make this project all the more urgent. Drawing on my previous experience, I will provide the intellectual leadership needed to bring together capoeira masters and practitioners, academics from various disciplines and digital specialists to deliver a range of accessible outputs, the most important being the creation of a long-lasting and sustainable database on capoeira. This raw material will be made available for registered users via the website, and will significantly facilitate further research by other academics and non-professional capoeira historians. An edited selection of the interviews, and complementary material with explanations will be made available on the website and in a virtual exhibition. Around 40 short clips will present an overview of the social and cultural backgrounds and life stories of these very diverse characters and careers. They will conjure the ambience of historic capoeira circles, and portray a culturally rich but also socially and racially divided city. A digital exhibition hosted by the Afro-Digital Museum will provide an appealing summary of the results for broader audiences, and will help schoolteachers to comply with recent Brazilian legislation that makes the teaching of Afro-Brazilian history compulsory in all secondary schools. Teaching will also be facilitated by an itinerary following the memory sites of capoeira in central Rio and its historical suburbs. This guided tour will be incorporated into a mobile phone app for easier access. A knowledge exchange between staff from the British Library, Essex University and Brazilian partners on data management, making digital history and achieving digital dissemination will help to optimise the project's research and its online accessibility, as well as contributing to the development of skills for the staff involved in a range of areas.

Amazon forests process and store large quantities of carbon in vegetation and soils. These forests, assumed to be mostly 'old-growth' and fire-free are exhibiting a remarkable feature-they are gaining the equivalent mass of a small car every year in aboveground biomass per hectare of forest (0.89 Mg/ha/yr). These gains are attributed to increasing atmospheric CO2, which has a fertilization effect on tree growth. However, fire in these 'old-growth' forests may be more recent than expected (in the last few centuries), and regrowth from fire together with soil charcoal-which has a fertility effect-may be contributing together with CO2 fertilisation to the observed increases in biomass in these apparently mature forests. Current understanding of drivers of these increases is limited by, (i) an unknown fire history of plots used to monitor change, and (ii) lack of information of how resource change affects these forests. The effects of pre-modern fire on forest regrowth and the gain have not been evaluated. Our pilot analysis of radiocarbon dated fire from soil charcoal indicates that even the wettest Amazon rainforest has burned, with forests considered to be 'old-growth' having burned within the last few centuries, and 70% of plots (n=70) containing visible soil charcoal fragments. Periodic drier climate and fire use by Native Americans before their populations collapsed ~450 years ago following Europeans colonisation may have resulted in a higher fire frequency than currently observed. Forest regrowth from these and more recent fires may still be occurring in forests considered to be 'undisturbed', e.g., some trees may grow to be 980 years old in central Amazonia, so that forest considered 'old-growth' may still be approaching equilibrium as long-lived trees mature following fire. Fire also produces soil pyrogenic carbon (PyC) as charcoal that is found in archaeological sites in terra preta soils and in upland soils across Amazonia far from evidence of human settlement. Soil PyC increases soil fertility on otherwise nutrient poor soils, and being resistant to decomposition, may have increased soil fertility across the Amazon. Pre-modern fire and soil PyC are therefore two important ingredients in understanding how Amazonian forests currently function. We will determine whether regrowth following past fire and soil PyC fertility effects in 'old-growth' permanent forest plots across Amazonia contributes to the observed carbon sink. We have developed a basin-wide network of on-the-ground sample plots, and because methods of measuring the forest with these are fully standardised even across nations they represent an excellent opportunity to measure the response of Amazon forest to historic fire and soil PyC. In permanent forest plots across the Amazon Basin our Objectives are: 1) determine spatial patterns in 'time since last fire'; 2) determine soil PyC stocks, and how these are affected by climatic, edaphic conditions, and fire intensity; 3) using results from (1) and (2), determine whether spatial patterns of productivity and carbon gains in aboveground tropical forest trees in Amazonia are consistent with regrowth from historical fire disturbance and by soil PyC acting as a soil fertility enhancer Our research will improve understanding of fire patterns across the Amazon for long-term forest plots (the same plots used to estimate the current carbon sink). We will provide a first quantification of: soil PyC stocks, basin-wide environmental drivers of soil PyC stocks, and whether soil fertility is greater where soil PyC levels are higher. This will be a first large-scale test of whether forest productivity, structure, and increases in carbon can be attributed to regrowth from historic fire and soil PyC fertility effects. The results are vital for conservation planning, to estimate the longevity of the carbon sink, and for policy such as Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD+).

Wildfires are becoming the new normal across Amazonia. Deforestation is transforming the region at a rate of around 10,000 square km/year (half the area of Wales), and now the area degraded annually -forest logged and burned but not cut down-is greater than the area deforested. Fire has historically been rare in Amazonia, meaning that the forests are not adapted to fire and the trees often die from fires - releasing carbon (C) back to the atmosphere and amplifying global climate change. Burning of tropical forests is already releasing more climate-warming carbon dioxide than fossil fuel burning in the whole of Europe. Trees in Amazonia contain around 7x more C than humans are releasing every year, and soils contain the same amount again, so it is vital to understand what is happening to this C and minimize emissions. As vegetation sheds its leaves, branches, and roots, or dies, some of the C released remains in the soil, and some is later decomposed and released back to the atmosphere. Carbon exists in the soil in many different forms, from new inputs from decomposing plant material to ancient C formed over millennia. Burning adds pyrogenic carbon (PyC) to the soil, a partially burnt form of C that is resistant to decomposition and could make the soil more fertile. Because soil C takes a long time to form, its conservation is particularly important. Despite the widespread increase in fire in Amazonia, there have been few measurements of soil C fractions and dynamics in burned areas - most have focussed on natural forests. Burned forests will have different composition, forest structure, and C dynamics. Understanding how different soil C fractions are formed and lost is crucial to understand how fire and climate change affect C storage. We propose to make major advances in understanding fire impacts, including the processes that affect the type and quantifies of soil C formed, and how C gains/losses vary over time, with soil type, and climate. We will combine new measurements with innovative modelling to inform land management strategies and C budgets. We have already collected data from across Amazonia in intact forests that have not recently burned. Crucially our project will collect a new, comprehensive dataset from human-modified forests, including logged, burned and abandoned land. We will use an approach known as a chronosequence, where we take samples at sites that were burnt at different times in the past, so we can see how the soil C has changed after e.g. 1 year, 2 years, or up to 20 years after a fire. This will then be used to develop a state-of-the-art land surface model, JULES, which forms part of the UK Earth System Model. At our sample sites, we will evaluate how different burn severities affect soil C, both in surface and deep soils, and how these change over time post-burning and with soil, climate, and land-use such as logging. At 3 focal sites, we will take detailed measurements of the decomposition rate of the C over 4 years, comparing measurements with different land-use, burn severity and wet vs dry seasons. Knowing what forms C takes after a fire and how fast it decomposes under different conditions will enable us to build these processes into the JULES model. We will model PyC globally for the first time and make projections of land C changes in Amazonia over the next ~40-60 years under different management practices. As well as transforming scientific understanding of post-fire soil C and its resilience to climate and management, our project will inform socio-environmental planning for sustainable resource use to conserve soil C. We will work with regional partners, fire managers, state and national policymakers to integrate our findings into decision-making to minimise negative fire impacts. Due to the Amazon Basin-scale of our work, these strategies are a crucial step to limit the risk of large-scale loss of soil C.