NCI has partnered with the Asociación Peruana para la Conservación de la Naturaleza (APECO) to significantly strengthen management and protection of the three large protected areas in Peru’s northern montane forests: Río Abiseo National Park, Alto Mayo Forest, and Cordillera de Colán Reserved Zone. This program supported by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.
Steep slopes and fragile soils make cloud forests highly susceptible to erosion. |
Andean cloud forests are critical to protect, because of their biodiversity and because their steep slopes and fragile soils make them highly susceptible to erosion and degradation. In the past, their remoteness and difficult access kept these beautiful forests inaccessible, protecting them from human encroachment. Today, however, with modern techniques and equipment, these cloud forests are increasingly threatened throughout their length and breadth, as people cut secondary roads within the forests and clear them for short-term gains in agriculture or timber.
Conserving Dry Tropical Forests of the Tumbesian Region
NCI has doubled the number of park personnel in these areas and begun several sustainable development and social programs with neighboring communities. Conservation of these three protected areas, totaling 1.4 million acres of the size of Delaware, forms the core of a conservation strategy for this entire ecosystem. More than 300 species of birds are found in these forests, of which 23 are threatened, including the Royal Sunangel (hummingbird), the endemic Ochre-fronted Antpitta, and rare Long-whiskered Owlet. One of the areas, the Rio Abiseo National Park, also harbors the endangered and endemic yellow-tailed wooly monkey and five endemic frog species.
NCI is working to protect cloud forest parks nearly the size of Delaware. |
NCI is working to protect these marvelous forests, an ecosystem with extremely high biological diversity due to the forests’ varied ecological zones and high species endemism. One of NCI’s chief strategies for conserving eastern Andean slope forests is through the effective protection and management of key sites that will form a north-south chain of protected areas the length of the ecosystem, complemented by appropriate community development plans that integrate conservation into new sustainable livelihoods for community members.
