Researcher helps acquire key information to ascertain 9 new protected areas in Peru

Florida International University (FIU) researcher Alessandro Catenazzi has helped collect the essential data wanted to expedite the institution of 9 new protected areas in one of the vital biologically various areas of Peru.

The Institute of Environment biologist was half of a giant collaborative conservation effort led by the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. The staff’s in depth speedy organic and social stock work helped quadruple the earlier variety of protected areas in Loreto, an expanse of Amazonian lowlands and Andean foothills bordering Brazil, Colombia and Ecuador.

“It’s easy to want to say, ‘Let’s protect this entire region,’ but you can’t protect 100 percent of an area,” Catenazzi mentioned. “You need more context, and that comes from documenting what animals and plants are there, so government authorities and decision-makers understand why a particular area needs protection—and that was our goal with the rapid inventories.”

Although it covers lower than 5 p.c of the Amazon basin, Loreto is likely one of the most various areas in the whole Amazon—residence to quite a lot of completely different species that aren’t discovered anyplace else on earth. It’s additionally residence to greater than 170,000 indigenous folks.

Catenazzi—an skilled in frog ecology and conservation who has helped determine and describe 45 new species—was on the organic speedy stock staff that documented amphibians and reptiles.

No roads or trails led to the distant Loreto areas being surveyed, so that they needed to get there by helicopter. Then, the staff arrange camp and spent the following few weeks documenting as a lot as they may. And lots was documented—greater than 17,000 sightings and greater than 10,000 images taken of species within the discipline. They additionally recorded a lot of new, beforehand undescribed species, together with 9 vegetation, 20 fish, 33 amphibians, three reptiles, two mammals and one hen.

In addition to the organic staff, there was additionally a social staff devoted to working intently with the native communities. They ensured residents had been concerned all through the method, taking into consideration the attitude and opinions of the folks most conversant in the proposed protected areas, and who usually had a few years of expertise managing land, however restricted alternatives to share their data.

This social staff additionally helped document one thing else essential, and typically missed—what the native folks name the completely different animals and vegetation.

Once the speedy organic inventories had been full and discipline guides created, the social staff shared them with the native residents. Documenting this cultural heritage is as necessary as documenting the abundance of life in Loreto, since some communities are down to a couple hundred folks and the native languages are disappearing. Today, the sector guides embrace the scientific names of animals and vegetation together with their names within the native languages Wampis and Awajún.

The hope is that this undertaking’s speedy stock course of can function a information for future conservation campaigns for different areas around the globe.

“There’s nowhere on earth where you don’t see the human footprint—we’re putting enormous pressure on this planet,” Catenazzi mentioned. “Without protected areas, there is no chance most biodiversity will survive in the future.”

The findings had been not too long ago printed in Science Advances.