Green vine snake, Yasuni (photo by flickr user ggallice)Published on Wednesday, January 20, 2010 by Environment News Service

QUITO, Ecuador – Yasuní National Park, located in the core of the Ecuadorian Amazon, is the most biodiverse area in all of South America, a team of Ecuadorean, American, and European scientists concludes in the first major peer-reviewed study of life forms in the park, published today. But the 13 scientists warn that proposed oil development in Yasuní threatens to destroy one of the world’s last high-biodiversity wilderness areas. … “Yasuní is at the center of a small zone where South America’s amphibians, birds, mammals, and vascular plants all reach maximum diversity,” said co-author Dr. Clinton Jenkins of the University of Maryland. “We dubbed this area the ‘quadruple richness center.'” “This quadruple richness center has only one viable strict protected area – Yasuní. The park covers just 14 percent of the quadruple richness center’s area, whereas active or proposed oil concessions cover 79 percent,” the authors write in the open-access scientific journal PLoS ONE, where the study appears today. “One of our most important findings about Yasuní is that small areas of forest harbor extremely high numbers of animals and plants,” said lead author Margot Bass, president of Finding Species, a nonprofit with offices in Quito and Maryland. “Yasuní is probably unmatched by any other park in the world for total numbers of species.” Yasuní contains 28 endangered vertebrates on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. These include large primates such as the white-bellied spider monkey and Poeppig’s woolly monkey and aquatic mammals such as the giant otter and Amazonian manatee, as well as and hundreds of regional species found nowhere else on Earth. An average upland hectare (2.47 acres) in Yasuní contains 655 tree species, more than are native to the continental United States and Canada combined. The number of tree species rises to over 1,100 for an area of 25 hectares. “In just one hectare in Yasuní, there are more tree, shrub, and liana [woody vine] species than anywhere else in the world,” said Gorky Villa, an Ecuadorian botanist working with both the Smithsonian Institution and Finding Species. … The scientists warn that oil can not be extracted without significant and irreversible negative ecological impacts, particularly in the remote and relatively intact oil rich northeast corner of Yasuní National Park which contains oil blocks 31 and ITT. …

Thirst for Oil Imperils South America’s Most Biodiverse Wilderness