The Amazonian wilderness harbors the greatest number of species on this planet and is an irreplaceable resource for present and future generations. Amazonia is crucial for maintaining global climate and genetic resources, and its forest and rivers provide vital sources of food, building materials, pharmaceuticals, and water needed by wildlife and humanity.
The Los Amigos watershed in the state of Madre de Dios, southeastern Peru, is representative of the pristine lowland moist forest once found throughout most of upper Amazonian South America. Threats to tropical forests occur in the form of fishing, hunting, gold mining, timber extraction, impending road construction, and slash-and-burn agriculture.
The Los Amigos watershed, consisting of 1.6 million hectares (3.95 million acres), still offers the increasingly scarce opportunity to study rainforest as it was before the disruptive encroachment of modern human civilization. Because of its relatively pristine condition and the immediate need to justify it as a conservation zone, this area deserves intensive, long-term projects aimed at botanical training, ecotourism, biological inventory, and information synthesis.
On July 24, 2001, the government of Peru and the Amazon Conservation Association signed a contractual agreement creating the first long-term permanently renewable conservation concession. To our knowledge this is the first such agreement to be implemented in the world. The conservation concession protects
340,000 acres of old-growth Amazonian forest in the Los Amigos watershed, which is located in southeastern Peru. This watershed protects the eastern flank of
Manu National Park and is part of the lowland forest corridor that links it to Bahuaja-Sonene National Park. The Los Amigos conservation concession will serve as a mechanism for the development of a regional center of excellence in natural forest management and biodiversity science.
Several major projects are being implemented at the Los Amigos Conservation Area. Louise Emmons is initiating studies of mammal diversity and ecology in the
Los Amigos area. Other projects involve studies of the diversity of arthropods, amphibians, reptiles, and birds. Robin Foster has conducted botanical studies at
Los Amigos, resulting in the labeling of hundreds of plant species along two kilometers of trail in upland and lowland forest. Michael Goulding is leading a fisheries and aquatic ecology program, which aims to document the diversity of fish, their ecologies, and their habitats in the Los Amigos area and the Madre de Dios watershed in general. With support from the Amazon Conservation Association, and in collaboration with U.S. and Peruvian colleagues, the Botany of the Los
Amigos project has been initiated.
At Los Amigos, we are attempting to develop a system of preservation, sustainability, and scientific research; a marriage between various disciplines, from human ecology to economic botany, product marketing to forest management. The complexity of the ecosystem will best be understood through a multidisciplinary approach, and improved understanding of the complexity will lead to better management. The future of these forests will depend on sustainable management and development of alternative practices and products that do not require irreversible destruction. The botanical project will provide a foundation of information that is essential to other programs at Los Amigos. By combining botanical studies with fisheries and mammology, we will better understand plant/animal interactions. By providing names, the botanical program will facilitate accurate communication about plants and the animals that use them. Included in this scenario are humans, as we will dedicate time to people-plant interactions in order to learn what plants are used by people in the Los Amigos area, and what plants could potentially be used by people. To be informed, we must develop knowledge.
To develop knowledge, we must collect, organize, and disseminate information. In this sense, botanical information has conservation value. Before we can use plant-based products from the forest, we must know what species are useful and we must know their names. We must be able to identify them, to know where they occur in the forest, how many of them exist, how they are pollinated and when they produce fruit (or other useful products). Aside from understanding the species as they occur locally at Los Amigos, we must have information about their overall distribution in tropical America in order to better understand and manage the distribution, variation, and viability of their genetic diversity. This involves a more complete understanding of the species through studies in the field and herbarium.
When the author says that, "botanical information has conservation value," (last paragraph) he means that
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