Your journey will take you into the heart of Brazil's wettest wilderness - the Pantanal. Your job is to collect as much information about this one-of-a-kind patchwork of ecosystems and report back to your team.

Your primary focus will be on work currently being conducted by Alexine Keuroghlian, a research scientist sponsored by the Brazilian university Uniderp. Alexine is working on a comprehensive study of peccaries and feral pigs and hopes to do the following with her research:

• To provide population estimates of peccaries and feral pigs and to investigate how feral pigs interfere with peccary foraging success.

• To measure how the availability of resources for peccaries and feral pigs changes between the wet and dry seasons. This is important because up to 80% of the Pantanal becomes covered with water during the annual flood cycle!

• To document the ecological role of peccaries as seed dispersers and predators of keystone fruits, and the impact of these activities on the biodiversity of the region.

Now go to What is the Pantanal to learn about this area, current threats to its animal and plant life as well as why we should bother to save it.

Listen to an exciting National Public Radio story on Alexine and her work with the peccaries of the Pantanal.