Straddling the watersheds of the Napo and Putumayo Rivers, a vast wilderness harbors a full sample of the megadiversity typical of western Amazonia and serves as a home, and source of food for the Maijuna people. They proposed an Area de Conservación Regional to protect the forest, their culture and ancestral land. A plan for conservation, participatory management, economic uses and adaptive management.

 

This proposal will protect a complex of Amazonian high terraces—a habitat unknown until our inventory—that shelters a flora and fauna with new, rare, and specialized species. The soils under the terraces and the adjacent forests support seven drainages, as well as the flora, fauna and its human residents. The plan to build a road through it, presents as an imminent threat that would sever the region in two and consequently open the door to colonists and deforestation.  

 

In contrast, formal protection of this landscape as the Área de Conservación Regional Maijuna will ensure the integrity of the watersheds, clean water, and the continuity of ecological and evolutionary processes for the long term, as well as a secure basis of life and culture for the Maijuna and other residents in the Napo and Putumayo drainages.