The Manu-Tambopata Corridor Initiative (MAT) was launched in February 2009 to conserve one of the most important biodiversity hotspots in the world, a 519,000 acre (210,000 hectare) area of rainforest in the Peruvian Amazon. This initiative is the centerpiece of ACA’s efforts to lessen the environmental impacts of the Interoceanic Highway, a transcontinental road that models predict could produce a swath of deforestation the size of Massachusetts and Connecticut combined.

The Interoceanic Highway is expected to be completed by 2011 and runs across the South American continent from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil on the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean ports of Peru. This expanse of paved highway threatens to create a band of deforestation of up to 62 miles (100km) across. Rampant deforestation in this region would likely change the weather patterns in the Amazon and emit millions of tons of carbon dioxide, a major greenhouse gas that contributes to climate change.

Establishing the Manu-Tambopata Corridor will protect the area between the Los Amigos Conservation Concession and the Tambopata reserve.  At the same time, it will conserve the last unprotected stretch at the heart of the Vilcabamba-Amboró Mega Corridor, which connects 16 protected areas from Peru to Bolivia in a chain of pristine tropical rainforest and pampa ecosystems. The region is home to an incredible abundance of plants and animals, including giant river otters, jaguars, scarlet macaws, spider monkeys, and wild vanilla trees among others. The MAT will connect world-famous Manu National Park to the Tambopata National Reserve by way of ACA’s Los Amigos Conservation Concession.

The objective of the MAT Corridor Initiative is to protect forest cover and ecological connectivity while creating sustainable economic and social benefits for local communities. ACA will work with rural families and regional policy makers to introduce a mosaic of conservation areas and sustainable land management practices that can make a profit, such as agroforestry, ecotourism, extraction of non-timber forest products, and carbon finance. The MAT initiative will promote these conservation-based industries as a substitute for predatory land uses that threaten to destroy the rainforest, such as logging, large-scale agriculture, cattle ranching and slash-and-burn farming. Stay tuned for updates as these exciting projects develop!

The Andean region’s smallest known frog was recently discovered in the cloud forest near Peru’s Manu National Park.  Over the past two years, 10 new frog species have been found in the forest around ACA’s Wayqecha Cloud Forest Research Station, which sits 9,824 feet above sea level in the department of Cusco. 

Smaller than a dime, the Noble’s pygmy frog (Noblella pygmae) surprised herpetologists studying at Wayqecha because it contradicts the informal rule that high altitude vertebrates tend to be larger than low altitude vertebrates.  Noble’s pygmy frog is among the smallest vertebrates ever found at this altitude, and one of the smallest amphibian species in the world.

In addition to its exceptionally small size, the species is unique because females lay only two eggs at a time, and instead of passing through an aquatic tadpole stage, baby frogs are land dwelling as soon as they hatch, which is possible thanks to the moist cloud forest habitat. Edgar Lehr from the Senckenberg Natural History Collection in Dresden, Germany and Swiss-Peruvian ecologist Alessandro Catenazzi from the University of California at Berkeley describe this new species in the latest issue of the journal Copeia.

The end of 2008 has been a time of change for ACA. In our most recent news, we would like to say goodbye to Dr. Nigel Pitman, ACA’s Science Director, who is moving to Brazil. We at ACA want to express our gratitude to Nigel, who has led the charge for strong and innovative science in all ACA’s programs.

Over the past 5+ years, Nigel has devoted his work to the development of the world-class Los Amigos Biological Station (CICRA). His warmth, creativity, and unfaltering dedication to science and conservation in the Peruvian Amazon will be greatly missed by both ACA and the CICRA community. We salute him for his numerous achievements (PDF, 5MB), including the Los Amigos biodiversity monitoring program, Science Saturdays, and turning CICRA into a bona fide research institution that welcomes researchers to a home away from home.

We would like to extend our thanks to Nigel and warm wishes to him and his family as they move on to new adventures.

In October 2008, ACA embarked on the final stage of our project to map all the Brazil nut stands in the northern territory of the indigenous Tacana. The tree census in the Bolivian Amazon is intended to support the Tacana petition for government recognition of their territorial land claim, known as a TCO in Bolivia.

Mapping activities and territorial management planning began in 2007, when ACA began work in the Puerto Pérez and El Tigre areas of Bolivia. Since then, much of the mapping has been conducted by CIPTA (Consejo Indígena del Pueblo Tacana), the Tacana People’s Council.

The data collected in this project will be used as the basis for natural resource management plans for the new TCO. These data will also be used to produce new knowledge about distribution of Brazil nut forests, nut production, harvesting dynamics, and growth rate.

Tacana TCO II History: Several years ago, CIPTA made a land claim in the Bolivian state of La Paz, known as TCO Tacana II, on behalf of four Tacana communities: Puerto Pérez, Las Mercedes, Toromonas, and El Tigre. However, since the TCO system requires indigenous petitioners to both prove that they actively use the natural resources within the land claim and create a natural resource management plan for the area, the claim was put on hold. Then, in April 2007, ACA began mapping locations of productive Brazil nut trees in the TCO to support the petition. By the end of 2007, researchers had completed a census of Brazil nut forests in Puerto Pérez and El Tigre. Between June and July 2008, they finished the Brazil nut census in Las Mercedes. So far a total of 13,019 Brazil nut trees have been mapped.

Gold mining in the Amazon can devastate riverside forests and human health. Artisanal gold miners, often from poor migrant communities, are lured to Madre de Dios, Peru by the dream of easy riches. The state is the most active alluvial gold mining region in Peru, producing between 50 and 100 tons of gold annually.

Unfortunately, that gold rarely enriches the artisanal gold-mining communities, who are sometimes entrapped by mounting debt for equipment, loans, and concession rentals. Instead, they find themselves locked in an endless cycle of deforestation, mercury poisoning, and poverty.

Artisanal miners extract gold from river bottoms and edges using dangerous techniques that expose them to high levels of mercury. Liquid mercury is used to amalgamate the gold, both at the site of extraction and later in shops or in homes where gold is boiled with mercury to form larger nuggets to sell to urban gold traders. Often, the mercury vapors waft out of cooking pots while the whole family looks on. The mercury can poison children and adults alike, causing extreme swelling, hair loss, weakened muscles, kidney dysfunction, insomnia, and memory impairment. In the environment, mercury is likely to reduce reproduction and cause birth defects in wildlife.

Over the last year, ACA has partnered with the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to produce new scientific data about mining-related mercury emissions in Madre de Dios and their impact on human health. In December 2007, USAID invited ACA to participate in a meeting with the EPA concerning mercury contamination, and a partnership was born. In May, ACA hosted EPA researchers at our project office in Puerto Maldonado, led tours of mining communities and gold shops, and introduced the EPA team to regional government representatives. On field trips, EPA researchers measured mercury levels that far exceeded any they had encountered at their other project sites, in countries as diverse as Brazil and Senegal. In the fall, the EPA team returned at the invitation of Madre de Dios regional government to install a pilot mercury-capture device that reduced mercury emissions from the amalgamation process by 90%.

Recently, these findings have sparked a dynamic conservation initiative, supported by ACA, the EPA, Argonne National Laboratory, Stanford University, and the Dirección Regional de Energia y Minas – Madre de Dios, to:

• Discover how much mercury is building up in the environment around gold mining communities by testing samples from plants, fish, soils, air, and people;
• Provide scientific data about mercury contamination to local decision makers; and
• Develop methods to limit these communities’ exposure to mercury.

One cornerstone of the initiative will be a mercury testing program for aquatic ecosystems. EPA-affiliated researchers plan to test the mercury levels of a variety of common food fish for sale at local markets, transcribing the results into a simple red-yellow-green guide for safe consumption, patterned on the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s popular Seafood Watch guide. As ACA seed-grant recipient Luis Fernandez noted, “Fish consumption is the most important pathway for human methylmercury contamination.”

Over the next year, look to ACA’s website to track progress on this exciting initiative and learn more about how we’re making conservation an attainable goal for local communities.

Figure from: “Mercury in the Environment” USGS Fact Sheet 146-00 (October 2000).

Cesar Moran-Cahusac began as ACA’s Executive Director in August 2007. Born in Lima, Peru, Cesar has worked on a wide spectrum of conservation projects.

At the Agrarian University of Lima (La Molina) where he studied animal sciences, he developed a hands-on environmental education program based on organic gardening for school children in Lima. He also worked for seven years as the Project Coordinator for the Machu Picchu Program, a debt for nature swap between Finland and Peru, which supported Machu Picchu’s environmental management.

Cesar received his graduate degree in Environmental Management from the Yale School of Forestry. He is based in Puerto Maldonado, Peru, but travels frequently to our project sites.

Converting muddy-boots field work to high-quality research takes years of hard work, but it’s beginning to pay off for our young research program in the Amazon. In the first six months of 2008 alone, work done at the Los Amigos Biological Station (CICRA, its Spanish acronym) generated 11 peer-reviewed articles, two Ph.D. dissertations, and half a dozen theses by Peruvian undergraduates.

In that same stretch, science at Los Amigos was featured in popular magazines in the United States (Natural History), Peru (Somos), and Italy (Natura). This publication rate puts us on par with the most productive research programs in the Amazon, like the Smithsonian’s 30-year forest fragments project in Manaus. And everything suggests that the productivity of Los Amigos scientists will keep building for the next several years. If you’re short of reading material, look for a flood of it coming soon to the ACCA website.

As the Interoceanic Highway is paved across highly biodiverse southeastern Peru, it is expected that forest loss will increase dramatically. Road improvement in the Amazon is typically associated with increased rates of deforestation, colonization, illegal logging, and land clearing for farming, artisanal gold mining, and cattle ranching. These practices spread through the construction of illegal secondary roads and increased in-migration. By some estimates, the paving could result in a 60 mile-wide swath of deforestation between Manu National Park and Tambopata National Reserve.

The Interoceanic Highway is especially problematic because it runs through previously remote, sparsely populated areas of pristine tropical forest. These forests are home to jaguars, giant river otters, rare bush dogs, and Harpy eagles.

ACA’s Interoceanic Highway Mitigation Strategy aims to reduce rampant deforestation by creating three major conservation corridors, which protect forest at high risk of logging and burning. The first corridor to be designed is the Malinowsky Conservation Corridor, which will conserve 210,000 hectares (518,920 acres) of primary forest. The Malinowsky Corridor preserves a forested corridor between Manú National Park and Tambopata National Reserve via ACA’s Los Amigos Conservation Concession

In dialogue with regional government and local partner organizations, ACA is designing the Malinowsky Corridor to include a mosaic of protected areas and support sustainable development alternatives to logging and slash-and-burn farming. Some of the proposed sustainable development alternatives include: sustainable forestry, community agroforestry, ecotourism, and carbon finance. These tools can ensure conservation of forest and biodiversity across the last continuous forest in the southwestern Amazon.  They can also avoid the emissions of millions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.