PARKS AND TRIBES

BIODIVERSITY ECUADOR: CONSERVATION HISTORY

Biodiversity conservation in Ecuador was started seriously in 1974 by a United Nations forestry and nature conservation project (Document in Spanish). At the time, there were only two national parks in the country, Galapagos National Park and Cotopaxi National Park, while there are currently a total of 71 protected areas.

A project of the United Nations Food and Agricultural organization (FAO) worked together with the Ministry of Agriculture of Ecuador to propose a representative network of protected areas. A team of biologist (Angel Paucar and I) a few foresters and a land use planner (Allen Putney, MSc) of the project and the ministry searched the entire country for the best natural areas. I, Dr. Daan Vreugdenhil, was a member of that United Nations research team, as I later became known as Parks Man Daan Vreugdenhil, PhD. The first time I entered the Amazon was in 1974, in my 3 cylinder, 450HP 4X4 Susuki Jeep over a newly built road to the oilboom town Lagoagrio. At the time, when I was exploring the Amazon jungle of Ecuador, I was not aware of the fact, that I was in reality witnessing the history of the last frontier of South America unfolding in front of my eyes, and many of the things I witnessed, I did not write down, nor did I take pictures of things that I should have recorded on camera. I am currently writing down those things I can remember in a book about the Amazon of Ecuador.

Due to the fact that in the 70s half of Ecuador was still covered by virgin tropical rainforest, much of the continent remained largely unknown: half of the outer Eastern Andes slopes, the majority of Ecuador's Esmeraldas coastal lowlands and mangroves of Ecuador, and a good portion of the Guayas mangroves, as well as 90% of the "Oriente", the Amazon region of Ecuador. Of the Western Andes slopes, there was just one area left with virgin jungle from the Paramo down to the coastal lowlands for which we proposed the Cotacachi-Cayapas Reserve. We tried to find a natural area, connecting the Eastern Andes to the Western Andes, but in absence of connecting natural areas, that was not feasible.

This is our history of the Biodiversity Conservation of Ecuador:

Our team traveled the four corners of the country, riding four-wheel-drives where we could, until we get stuck in the mud or were stopped by cliffs and/or impenetrable jungle. 90% of the Ecuadorian Amazon was still was covered under virgin rainforest and incredibly inaccessible and the project assigned the Amazon to me as the area to be studied for selecting potential protected areas. To carry out my task, I selected a special team to assist me in exploring the Amazon jungle. This team - like myself at the time - consisted of young conservation biologists and we started combing the entire region region from North to South and East to West. I started out exploring from dug-out motorized canoes, taking them as far as they could go. When the engines got stuck we peddled up smallest creeks where motorized canoes no longer could. What we could not travel by canoe, we first explored from small airplanes operated by missionaries, which worked with indigenous tribes. Many of those tribes had small airstrips so they could receive medical attention for the missionaries.  Using those, I visited isolated Indian tribes, landing on airstrips often no longer than a football field long and as level as a "freshly ploughed corn field". Later on, those villages served as base camps for exploring the jungle on foot.

Now, you should realize that the term biodiversity was not yet invented in those days. In the conservation world there was just one IUCN document that gave some vague ideas of biological representation of species, but it did not really help us in setting solid criteria for selecting areas to a national conservation system of protected areas. In scientific circles, the term "species diversity" was known, and I, as the only graduated biologist of the team was familiar with the concept, but I had no idea on how to deal with it. Like many biologists until the present day, I thought that one needed to carry out inventories of areas, which I organized at least a decade before the idea of "rapid ecological  assessment was invented by Conservation International. Such assessment consisted of inventories mainly done by biologists. With the participation of a large team of French scientists of the ORSTOM (Office de la Recherche Scientifique et Technique Outre-mer) mission together with famous ornithologists like Dan Talman and Robert Ridgely. So we collected thousans of species of plants, birds and insects, but we did not really know how to translate that knowledge into conservation proposals.

However, our team leader, Alan Putney, had the splendid idea to have a representation of as many regions as possible, thus actually incorporating a great variety of ecosystems. Nowadays this idea is the rational bases of efficient protected areas concepts. See my document "COMPREHENSIVE PROTECTED AREAS SYSTEM COMPOSITION"

From my slide collection, some of my historic photographs from the FAO exploration of Ecuador's outstanding natural areas in 1975. We would first drive as far as the roads would take us, like this one into the Sangay region, and then hike with tents on our backs. We would paddle our canoes as far upstream as they would take us in the Amazon's lowlands, as shown here when the river was only 10 centimeters deep. Missionaries' Short Take-of and Landing (STOL) Helio airplanes took us to airstrips sometimes as short as 90 meters, from where we would hike for weeks through the virgin jungle of the Amazon region. Our explorations were true expeditions through a virgin Amazon jungle with hardly known Indian tribes. Those expeditions were similar to those written in National Geographic for tropical Africa, but of course we never were covered by the magazine as we were too busy to search for that kind op publicity.

So, based on the recommendations of this United Nations Study by the FAO (available only in Spanish), in 1976, a total of 39 areas were recommended to the government of Ecuador for protection, 9 areas, including the country's two largest areas, Cuyabeno and Yasuni were proposed on the bases of my explorations.

In 1979 all 39 proposed areas were gazetted as protected areas. They were the first areas of what now make up Ecuador's System of  Protected Areas of Ecuador. At the time, those areas only covered 9% of the country's territory. Over time, that number grew to 71 protected areas that now cover almost 20% of the country's territory including a large swath of marine territory.

The Cuyabeno watershed, which was going to be a "Fauna Production Reserve," was one of those places. Let me explain this term, because very few people today are aware of the history of this management category. The FAO promoted game farming and wildlife farming and hunting reserves in Africa in the middle of the 1970s. So, we thought it would be a good idea to try something similar in Ecuador, hoping it would generate income from wildlife farming and commercial hunting to pay for management costs. We believed that it would also provide opportunities for the Sionas, the only resident local indigenous people, to participate in the production of fauna by utilizing their own hunting and fishing traditions. As a result, it was proposed  that the Cuyabeno watershed would become a Fauna Production Production Reserve.

Over time, Ecuador's Galapagos Islands became increasingly well-known internationally as a tourism destination while ecotourism rose in popularity. Legislation to permit the use of fauna production and hunting in protected areas never was passed.  In retrospect that was very fortunate indeed, as we, at the time were still unaware that humid tropical forests can't support game farming. Cuyabeno is now a national park, and the Cofan and Siona Indians are heavily involved in the tourism industry, which provides them with employment while the reserve protects a large portion of their traditional lands.

However, legal protection of the areas proved insufficient, and small farmers from the Andes had moved into the most accessible part of the reserve and cut down forest to create farmland, where oil-exploitation roads had opened in the a part of the area by 1983.

INVASION OF THE CUYABENO NATURE RESERVE

The then, director of the reserve, Dr. Flavio Coello - now Professor of Nature Management at the Catholic University in Quito, visited  me in my then home in Netherlands to ask me to go back to Ecuador and work with Flavio at a solution. After analyzing the situation, we advised the Government, that the invaded part of the watershed could best be excluded from the area, as too many families had already established their farms. That is why the upper part of the reserve has a bottleneck incision. There was still a lot of uninhabited jungle to "move" the reservation eastward. As director of Cuyabeno, Flavio succeeded to convince the national director of the protected areas system to expand the park, which now reaches all the way to the border with Peru, also including the Lagarto Cocha Lakes, thus making Cuyabeno Faunistic Reserve the second largest nature reserve of Ecuador. In 1985, I participated in a United Nations team on sustainable development of the Oriente of Ecuador. Cuyabeno remained under pressure as Ecuador depended on oil revenues and continued to open exploration roads into the reserve.

Our partner, Dr. Flavio Coello, who is now Professor of Nature Management at the Catholic University in Quito, who was the reserve's director at the time, came to my home in the Netherlands, asked me to return to Ecuador to help him find on a solution to these illegal settlements. After analyzing the situation together, we advised the government of Ecuador, to exclude the invaded portion of the watershed from the reserve because too many families had already established their farms there. This is why you can see a bottleneck incision on the map of the upper portion of the reserve. However, there was still a lot of uninhabited virgin jungle east of the Cuyabeno watershed. So we were  able to persuade the national director of the protected areas system, Ing Arturo Ponce, to expand the park from the original 150,000 hectares to about 600,000 hectares. As a result, the park now extends all the way to the border with Peru and includes the Lagarto Cocha Lakes, making Cuyabeno Faunistic Reserve Ecuador's second-largest nature reserve. Moreover, both Peru and Colombia added bordering protected areas to the reserve, thereby growing the total area protected to more that 2,000,000 hectares of virgin Amazon jungle.

Some of my scanned historical slides from 1983 and 1985 showing deforestation after the road to the border with Colombia, traversing the Cuyabeno Wildlife Reserve. In addition to deforestation for oil extraction (slides 1 and 2), the road had made it possible for settlers to move in, who began cutting down the jungle for cattle raising. In addition, oil exploitation in those days was extremely messy, and at each pumping station pouring out oir spills into the jungle. Please be aware that these pictures are scans of our old, partially restored slides from the 1980s. They are not of our contemporary quality.

The Cuyabeno Lodge

We stressed the importance of ecotourism be promoted by the government, as it would be both politically and socially difficult to justify such large stretch of land being protected, if there were no economic benefit for both the national economy or the local people. That was, however, easier said than done because there was no way to visit the reserve without spending the night. So we proposed that the government would grant permission to build and operate the Cuyabeno Lodge. Se selected a seasonal island in the Cuyabeno Lake, making it the first lodge. My wife and I financed most of the construction of the lodge for which we sold our house in the Netherlands to finance the construction of the lodge, for which we received a small encouragement subsidy from the Government of the Netherlands, which was channeled through the WWF of the Netherlands. This subsidy was to be spend entirely on educational services, particularly training courses for the indigenous people in Cuyabeno and an exposition in the visitor center. While we ourselves worked for many years without pay, we always made sure that our partners were paid, including the first director, Cecilia Hernandez. 

Entering with our first group in 1986, We successfully sold tours in the Netherlands and in Germany, the proceeds of which continued to finance the construction and expansion of the Cuyabeno Lodge.

As essential part of the lodge, we maximized the benefits for the indigenous people, which at the time were the Sionas of Puerto Bolivar. While our license with the government entitled us to operate our own motorized canoes, from the beginning we hired the Sionas for all our transportation needs. We also organized the first guiding training course for Cuyabeno as well as a course for the women in various industrious activities as well as western cooking, so they could work in the lodge. We are still the only lodge that employs Sionas on a rotation base, established by themselves. Through our way of working, we initiated an important local tourism economy in an area where there was no employment whatsoever.

CUYABENO LOOP and LAGARTO COCHA EXPEDITION

Originally, all ecotourism was concentrated around Lake Cuyabeno. Cuyabeno, though, is a huge reserve that contains numerous lakes and beautiful sites, including the Cofan Lodge at Zabalo, and the huge marsh area at the border with Peru, in the Lagartococha area of the reserve. so recently we developed, the five-day Cuyabeno Loop, an epic 200-kilometer journey through the Reserve's eastern part, was developed by biologists. The Lagarto Cocha Expedition is available for those who want to explore the jungle in a more daring manner. It takes you to the undiscovered lakes and creeks near the border with Peru.

NATIONAL PARKS TOURS

Furthermore, Flavio and I were of the opinion that other parks and reserves on the mainland were and continue to be severely underutilized. Averaging between one and two visitors per day, many locations only receive a few hundred or a few thousands of visitors annually. This really is insufficient to justify their protection politically and economically. Therefore, we collaborate with indigenous people and established the Ecuadorian company "Parks and Tribes." As professionals in protected areas management with PhD's we are the most knowledgeable professionals on the protected area system in the nation. We have traveled the entire country many times for our nature conservation work. We  have put our knowledge of the nature of Ecuador to work to create a National Parks Tours that are logistically manageable possible so that visitors can enjoy some of Ecuador's most beautiful National Parks, landscapes and ecosystems. as well as Ecuador's  Amazon and Galapagos National Park. By combining both the best protected areas of Ecuador with its fabulous culture, our tours offer you the best places to visit in Ecuador in 2023, while

the best time to visit Ecuador is all year around! Find more national parks tours in other countries.

7 DAYS PERU CULTURAL HIGHLIGHTS MODULE

For many clients, the opportunity to travel to south America only occurs in a lifetime. Therefore, they like to combine their trip with seeing the cultural highlights of Peru. For that purpose, we also offer a 7 days Lima - Cusco - Machu Picchu Module.

BIODIVERSITY CONSERVATION ECUADOR