Our goal was to create conservation baseline species and ecosystem maps for the Andes-Amazon regions of Peru and Bolivia to inform planning and effective conservation action at regional and local scales and to build local and regional capacity for developing and using this biodiversity information.
The eastern slope of the Andes and the adjacent Amazonian forests are home to the world’s highest diversity of birds, one-third of all freshwater fish species and more than 60,000 plant species, half of which are found nowhere else. By almost any measure, this region harbors some of the most important biodiversity found anywhere on Earth.
Yet, today this extraordinary wilderness is under threat. Human populations and economic activity exert increasing pressures on natural resources. Across the slopes of the Andes and the Amazon basin, loss of forests and other wild lands to logging, cattle ranching, mining, agriculture, and infrastructure continues at rates of up to 9,000 square miles per year. Balancing conservation of these irreplaceable landscapes with the needs of local peoples to earn their livelihoods is a global responsibility that we share.
Since the project ended in 2007, hundreds of students, conservation practitioners and planners have used the data and products delivered with this project to create new protected areas, prioritize areas, estimate carbon biomass for REDD projects, and countless other applications of the distribution maps of ecosystems and endemic species.