Born in the Eastern Amazon, Carlos Peres was exposed to Amazonian natural history from age six and never looked back. His father's ~5,000-hectare forest landholding in Acará (State of Pará), 98% of which consisting of undisturbed primary forest, was a formative playground. For the last 39 years he has been studying wildlife community ecology in Amazonian forests, the population ecology of key neotropical forest resource populations, the biological criteria for designing tropical protected areas, and community-based integrated conservation-development. He currently co-directs four ecology and conservation research programs throughout Amazonian forests, including the ecology of key timber and non-timber forest resources; patterns of vertebrate assemblage structure in Amazonian forests; the biological dynamics of hyper-disturbed and fragmented forest landscapes, and the biodiversity consequences of land-use change. He has also worked in Mesoamerica and other Neotropical biomes, including the Atlantic Forest, the Caatinga, the Cerrado and the Pantanal Wetlands. He currently leads the world’s largest multi-taxa program of quantitative biodiversity inventories in any tropical forest region. He has published over 500 papers on neotropical forest ecology and conservation at scales ranging from populations to landscapes, and to entire continents. This work has been cited over 64,800 times. He has worked at over 125 forest sites in six of the nine Amazonian countries and supervised the postgraduate work of over 132 students from 23 countries. In 1995, he received the "Biodiversity Conservation Leadership Prize Award" from the Bay and Paul Foundation (USA), and in 2000 he was elected an "Environmentalist Leader for the New Millennium" by Time Magazine and CNN Network. In 2023, he won the inaugural Frontiers Planet Prize as “International Champion”. His team have also won the 2nd place award in the XPRIZE Rainforest competition, initially joined by 298 teams. He is a Professor of Conservation Ecology at University of East Anglia (UK) and Founder and Science Director of Instituto Juruá, an Amazonian nonprofit conservation NGO that successfully implements community-based conservation. He serves as Policy Adviser to Ministry of Environment (Brazil) on a range of conservation and development issues in the Amazon.