Caroline Arantes is interested in ecology and conservation of fishery resources in freshwater ecosystems, including fish population and community ecology, management approaches, and the effects of human drive-impacts. Caroline has worked extensively with local people, institutions and conservation organizations to implement community-based management systems for the arapaima, the Amazon’s most historically important and overfished species, and to develop research that seeks to understand a broad range of problems and research questions. Her researches has addressed fish biology, ecology, traditional knowledge, and resource governance and her studies have been published in eight peer-reviewed, international journals. She also published six book chapters, 30 abstracts in conference proceedings, and has presented orally at various scientific meetings. She is now developing a study for her Doctoral Dissertation at Texas A&M university to test the hypothesis that deforestation of Amazon River floodplains impacts fish communities and fisheries productivity. Together with Dr. Kirk O. Winemiller, her PhD advisor, Caroline developed a quantitative methodology that compares fish communities, fishery yields, and forest cover along a gradient of forest conservation status (e.g., from the most
preserved to the most degraded areas) in order to facilitate examination of the relationships among variables and evaluation of alternative causal relationships.