Latest Field Museum Inventory Zeroes in on Carbon Hotspot in Amazonian Peru
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
December 15, 2014
Latest Field Museum Inventory Zeroes in on Carbon Hotspot in Amazonian Peru
A multidisciplinary team led by The Field Museum is back from the field after completing a rapid inventory of a remote wilderness area in Amazonian Peru. The inventory—The Field Museum's 27th since 1999—aimed to survey the plants, animals, and social landscape of an area believed to contain some of the country's highest biodiversity and carbon stocks.
During three weeks in October the team of 30 biologists and social scientists surveyed forests, rivers, and communities in a roadless 800,000-acre area in the Tapiche and Blanco watersheds roughly 125 miles south of Iquitos. Long regarded as a conservation priority because it harbors the country's largest expanses of stunted white-sand forest, this landscape is at risk from ongoing illegal logging operations.
During the inventory biologists recorded 1,751 plant, fish, amphibian, reptile, bird, and mammal species, including 11 species believed to be new to science. Highlights reported by the team in public lectures in Iquitos and Lima in early November include a primate community of up to 17 species—including a bright orange Callicebus monkey that has stumped regional experts— savannas and stunted forests growing on deep peat deposits, some of the most extreme blackwater habitats ever recorded in the Amazon, and 17 substantial range extensions for Amazonian birds.
"Most of the range extensions are birds that specialize on scattered patches of white-sand forest," said the Field Museum's Doug Stotz, who led the ornithological team. "Those are the species that really need a well-designed protected areas network."
Social scientists visited four communities during the inventory and partnered with residents to document community assets, natural resource use, and their aspirations for the future. There are currently 23 indigenous communities and other settlements along the Tapiche and Blanco rivers, with a total population of 3,000. The communities’ input helped inform the team's recommendations for conservation action, which include the creation of a new protected area open to sustainable resource use.
"For decades the area has been a no man's land where illegal loggers were king," said Diana Alvira, a social scientist from The Field Museum. "The communities we visited are starting to recognize that they can change that if they band together."
Over the last 15 years, The Field Museum's rapid inventory program has helped governments establish 17 new protected areas totaling 21 million acres.
Nine members of the Tapiche-Blanco inventory team were Iquitos-based scientists who are completing two years of training with The Field Museum. The Brain Scoop’s Emily Graslie and Tom McNamara also joined the team in Peru and documented their time in the field for their digital audience. New Brain Scoop episodes will be uploaded every other Wednesday on their YouTube channel this winter. To learn more about The Field Museum’s conservation efforts at home and across the globe, visit Restoring Earth at the Museum or online at http://restoringearth.fieldmuseum.org/.
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