Newly-declared conservation area in Peru is home to pink dolphins, giant armadillos, and woolly monkeys

The Amazon Basin contains the world’s largest system of rainforest and rivers. Two of these rivers, the Putumayo and the Algodón, merge near the northern border of Peru, and the region shaped by these rivers is home to thousands of species of animals and plants. However, illegal logging and gold mining has threatened both the wildlife in the area and the way of life of the many Indigenous peoples who steward the region. But after more than a decade of work from an international team of scientists, community leaders, government officials, and more, the Peruvian government established the Medio Putumayo-Algodón as an official Regional Conservation Area.

“There are still forests in the Amazon that are as wild as they were 1,000 years ago, and this is one of them,” says Nigel Pitman, Mellon Senior Conservation Ecologist at the Field Museum’s Keller Science Action Center. “This area being protected is the realization of a dream we’ve shared for 20-plus years with our Peruvian partners. A lot of conservation work is a pressed-for-time, get-it-done-now enterprise, but some of the most rewarding victories are built slowly and painstakingly, over decades.”

The preserved area is more than 1,000 square miles, larger than New York City and Los Angeles combined. When Field Museum scientists visited the region in 2016 to conduct an inventory of wildlife, they estimated that the area is home to at least 3,000 species of plants, 550 fish species, 110 amphibians, 100 reptiles, and 160 mammals. Many of these animals are endangered or vulnerable to extinction, including pink river dolphins, 5-foot-long giant armadillos, and woolly monkeys. These animals’ survival in this region is shaped by Indigenous stewardship.

“The Putumayo River is remarkably well-preserved, in no small part due to the efforts of local communities, researchers like those at the Field Museum and our partners, and the Peruvian government,” says Jeremy Cambell, the director of the Andes-Amazon Program in the Field Museum’s Keller Science Action Center.

Part of the Field’s 2016 rapid inventory involved a team of social scientists meeting local community members to learn about their relationship with the land and what they needed to continue their stewardship of it. The official designation of the Regional Conservation Area (RCA) this week represents an opportunity for local indigenous communities to shore up and revitalize their cultural identity, allowing them to sustainably hunt and fish while carrying out traditional cultural practices within the RCA.

“We hope that this RCA will bring a benefit to our communities. We will be able to take care of our forest, we are going to monitor our forests, so that outsiders do not enter our territory, to be able to avoid the extraction of wood and gold that harms us a lot,” says Gervinson Perdomo Chavez, former leader of the Puerto Franco Indigenous community, as reported by the Andes Amazon Fund, an important partner in the effort to protect the region.

“Local communities will play a key role in determining how the regions they know best can be preserved for future generations, in collaboration with the regional and national governments and a coalition of researchers and NGOs who are committed to supporting local management of the area,” says Campbell.

While the new RCA represents just a small portion of the Amazon rainforest overall, it’s part of a larger effort to preserve a connected chain of land and rivers. “The Putumayo-Algodón RCA is part of a constellation of protected areas, and it joins an array of Indigenous reserves, National Parks, and regional reserves where the Field Museum and our partners have been working for decades,” says Campbell. “It’s a crucial component for assuring connectivity of forests, rivers, and habitat at the landscape level.”

“This is an area of the Amazon where the Field Museum has been working since 2003, in support of a large-scale vision called the Great Indigenous Landscape,” says Pitman. “The tract of rainforest that was protected this week neighbors two other tracts that were protected in 2010 and 2016, as well as two still-unprotected tracts where the museum did rapid inventories in 2012 and 2019. In contrast to other areas of the Amazon where landscapes are coming unstitched, what’s happening in the Putumayo is a great knitting-together of forests.”

The Field Museum has continued working in the area; a team returned last month from another rapid inventory nearby. “The tract of forest that was protected this week is about 150 miles from the campsite in western Brazil where our team encountered a jaguar last month,” says Pitman. That’s farther than it is from Chicago to the Mississippi River—and what’s wonderful is that that jaguar can now walk that whole distance through forests that are protected for perpetuity.”

The Medio Putumayo-Algodón Regional Conservation Area was established through the leadership and participation of the departmental government of Loreto, the regional environmental agency of Loreto, and surrounding communities, with support from Instituto del Bien Común, Andes Amazon Fund, Wyss Foundation, Art into Acres, Re:wild, Bezos Earth Fund, Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Sociedad Peruana de Derecho Ambiental, Conservation International, and the Field Museum in Chicago.

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