The long view

The forests of Peru, as in most tropical nations, are in deep trouble. Vast canopies that should look from the air like a sea of broccoli are giving way to heaps of slash, barren pits, and open pools of toxic water.

“It looks more like the land of 10,000 lakes. They’ve just made Minnesota out here,” says Wake Forest’s Silman of La Pampa. “Now we have a tropical ecosystem that has a lot of open water. We know nothing about what happens [next] in these ponds.” The number of lakes is precisely 5,058, based on 2019 analysis by CINCIA.

Silman spent the summer in Peru using a range of drone technology to try to understand the nation’s functioning forests and these waste places — centering on forest ecology along the Amazon-to-Andes elevation gradient between 150 and 3,500 meters (500 and 11,500 feet), while looking at varied responses to illegal mining and land conversion in Amazonian lowland forests.

He uses both deep and shallow machine learning to process the vast amounts of data his unmanned aerial vehicles collect while flying over intact forest and mining-transformed wetland. At the precision conservation workshop, Silman displays his medium-range fixed-wing vertical takeoff and landing aircraft, along with a medium-endurance copter with a thermal imager able to fly and function at night.

As unregulated mining spreads its destructive fingers across the Madre de Dios to Manú landscape, most observers would write off devastated places like La Pampa as unrecoverable. But Silman and Forsyth have a different view: we need to focus on the entire landscape — that which is intact, and that which seems lost — they say, not thinking in a 10-year time frame, but 50 to 100 years ahead.

“What is a system of land use that you can put in place that is targeted recoverable, and how is this landscape permeable for species moving through?” Silman asks.

Forsyth says that a long-term commitment, requiring large-scale investment, protection and understanding, is vital to the future of the Amazonian biome and fundamental for our survival as a species.

As the climate crisis progresses, he says, the tropical mountains that become conservation areas and span elevation gradients will become critical for the adaptation of species, with all creatures needed aboard this altitudinal Noah’s Ark; the spider monkey and woolly monkey, for example, disperse the seeds of hardwoods, making them critical for retaining Amazon carbon stores. Without those primate-sown seeds, trees could vanish, rainy seasons could evolve into perpetual drought, with rainforests turned to savanna, and the landscape spewing vast sums of stored carbon into the atmosphere, perhaps hurrying the pace of the climate crisis beyond our ability to cope with it.

Despite the arguments of loggers, miners and many politicians, what is good for the environment is good for the economy, says Forsyth. “A lot of people think national parks are a financial black hole that retards development,” he says. But “we’ve found that it brings Peru $1.5 billion per year, and is 7 times the size of the logging industry. Who benefits? Ladies who do laundry, taxi drivers, restaurants. The economic benefits of national parks are diffused through society and they are considerable. Part of our goal is convincing people that conserving land is a good development strategy in the long term and in the short term. It’s not about taking money away from poverty alleviation. It’s part of poverty alleviation.”

After a morning canoeing the Los Amigos River, I walk with Forsyth uphill on a lightly traveled path back to the biological station. Along the way, we play a counting game. Every few feet, we encounter a different species of Melastoma, a tropical plant identified by its ridged leaves. One variant has fuzzy-edged leaves. One is shiny. One has a thick stem with ants living inside. Another has a long, oval shape. Still another has leaves the size of dinner plates. We spot 14 different species along the trail within the successive tiers of vegetation.

While Forsyth doesn’t say so, that’s the whole point of the game: to see the immense diversity of this Amazonian lowland forest by counting its humblest, seemingly unremarkable vegetation. Stunningly, this part of Peru has more tree species per hectare than all of North America. Its mega-biodiversity is profound; jaguars, giant otters, giant armadillos, tapirs, peccaries, and several species of primates live here, but that’s just a drop in the speciation bucket. Tech deployed in this remote place has the potential to increase transparency in reporting environmental crimes and aiding enforcement. It can also greatly expand our knowledge of the creatures who call it home. Visiting, I came to understand that conservation technology is the journey, not the destination.

Camera trap footage courtesy of Los Amigos Biological Station/ACCA

Banner image caption: A Margay (Leopardus wiedii) spotted in Madre de Dios, Peru. Image by Rhett Butler/Mongabay.

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Clarification: The number of camera traps installed by Andy Whitworth and ACCA was revised from 72 to 62 as was the number of points in the grid system.