Introduction

Three analyses -- one in 1975, a second in 1981, and a third in 1990 -- have compared biogeographic priorities for conservation in the Amazon basin and progress in establishment of protected areas. Each in their time has been strongly influential in both the creation of new areas and in guiding development away from critical areas for biodiversity conservation. A decade after the last analysis, an up to date analysis is sorely needed because of a rush of new knowledge, of new priorities and a plethora of new development schemes and initiatives. We (Thomas E. Lovejoy from Smithsonian/World Bank and Sir Ghillean T. Prance from the Royal Botanic Garden at Kew -- each with over 30 years of experience in the Amazon -- with the assistance of Ryan G. Valdez from the Amazonia Science Gallery at the Smithsonian) are working to provide a basis for just such an analysis. This requires Geographic Information System (GIS) technology which in turn makes it possible to establish a continuously updated Amazonia GIS system accessible via the internet. As a consequence integrated information about the Amazon will be accessible with a transparency unparalleled previously. We anticipate that as powerful as the initial analysis will be, it will be dwarfed by the effects of internet accessible continuously updated information about the entire array of interests, plans and activities in the basin.

Background

The eight country region of the Amazon is one of the great conservation and development challenges of the world. It certainly represents the greatest single concentration of biodiversity anywhere, and together with the boreal forests of Siberia constitute the world's two greatest remaining forests and two greatest wilderness areas. In all these nations, the Amazon is in some ways still a second tier priority, and previously mostly treated as hinterland or frontier. It is also an area of rapid change; 1997 forest fires of the same magnitude as those of southeast Asia were the consequence of the interaction of land use and El Nino. At the moment a variety of individual decisions are being made in each of the countries, about highways, gas pipelines and other infrastructure often with insufficient coordination between them or environmental agencies. At the same time the growing involvement of civil society in the form of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in many of these countries is a developing force for environmental good. President Fernando Henrique Cardoso of Brazil understands the need for a coordinated visionary approach as does President Pastrana of Colombia. The Secretariat of the Amazon Cooperation Treaty (TCA) is due to move to a permanent home in Brasilia. Only one country (Colombia) remains
to ratify this move and that is expected soon. The President of the World Bank, the Director-General of IUCN and the Director-General of the United Nations Environment Program are all interested in providing technical support for coordinated and sustainable development for the Amazon as a whole. The data and analysis proposed here are fundamental to such an exercise. Without them an Amazon wide strategy is not possible.

The last time an analysis of Amazon conservation priorities and progress was published was 1981 (Wetterberg, G.B., G.T.Prance and T.E.Lovejoy, 1981. Conservation Progress in Amazonia: A Structural Review. Parks 6(2):5-10). In subsequent years, conservation priorities for the entire Amazon have been amplified and refined beyond those cited in the 1981 paper. Principal among those was Workshop 90 held in Manaus in January of that year (with support from the W. Alton Jones Foundation) with the participation of over 100 experts in the flora and fauna of the Amazon. The implementing entities were the New York Botanical Garden (where Prance was Vice President for Science at the time) and Conservation International (CI). The main product of that workshop was a published map of conservation priorities (ranked in broad categories) and existing protected areas of various types. Other priority setting exercises which bear on the subject but which are not exclusively focussed on the Amazon per se include World Wildlife Fund's Global 200 and ecoregions, Conservation International's hotspots and the World Resource Institute's frontier forests. There was also a World Bank supported biodiversity priority setting exercise for the Latin America and Caribbean region carried out by the Biodiversity Support Program (a consortium involving WWF, WRI and the Nature Conservancy). This latter, while germane, was of necessity at a coarse scale and therefore of limited value to the considerations here There have also been a number of relevant national priority setting exercises, such as one funded by Germany for Peru. Most recently (September 2000) there was a workshop in Macapa (capital of the Brazilian Amazon state of Amapa) to define new priorities for conservation in the Brazlian Amazon. All of these need to be integrated into one coherent picture. Over this same period a variety of conservation units have been established, some at the national level, and others at the state/province level. These include some kinds of units which did not exist previously. While some of these are not synonymous with traditional protected areas (e.g. extractive reserves, indigenous areas of various sorts), they are nonetheless part of the overall picture of progress toward fulfillment of conservation priorities and sustainable development. This is a dynamic topic and a number of new areas are being planned at the moment (a state cerrado reserve in Amapa, a new type of protected area in French Guiana, and the World Bank/WWF Amazon Region Protected Area = ARPA project which will add an additional 10% of the Brazilian Amazon in strictly protected areas).

The Amazonia GIS System

Clearly it will be fundamentally useful for sustainable development in the Amazon to pull together and analyze all existing information about biodiversity conservation priorities and existing protected areas as well as to examine the experience gained from the previous exercises. The proposed effort would be even more useful if it were to include information on the vectors of development, e.g. various concessions, infrastructure projects and settlement schemes. For example, there is a large number of oil and gas concessions particularly but not exclusively along the Amazon slopes of the Andes (areas particularly rich in endemic species) Also relevant are existing and potential mineral and forest concessions, and proposed hydro-electric (including transmission lines) and other infrastructure projects. The power of such analysis is demonstrated by the recent combination of the most recent information on fire vulnerability in the Amazon with the projects of Avanca Brasil ( a product of IPAM, the Institute for Research on the Amazon and its partner the Woods Hole Research Center).

Were this to be published in the conservation literature as have previous region-wide analyses, it would be a useful contribution to sustainable development in itself. The conservation/development scenario of the Amazon is sufficiently dynamic, however, that something more than a periodic assemblage and analysis of the disparate pieces is desirable. The amount of information which needs to be pulled together will already require the use of GIS, so it seems sensible to develop a system accessible to all interested parties from Amazon nation governments and agencies to NGOs. It seems preferable at the outset for such a system not to be located institutionally at either the Treaty, a Development Agency (like the World Bank) or an NGO to avoid either perception or reality about controlled or biased data, while at the same every effort will be made to involve all interested parties. Consequently, the Amazonia Science Gallery at the Smithsonian Institution can serve as a neutral science based institutional location. This also provides a place for public viewing and interaction apart from the internet.. Nonetheless the Amazon Treaty will be engaged early on, and offered the opportunity to become a second node. Already in the process of assembly, the GIS data is already available worldwide using
Internet Map Server (IMS) Technology. Much of the data are in the public domain. With World Bank funding and the help of the Bank's GIS unit, a server has been established at the Amazonia Science Gallery.

The Smithsonian has acquired an appropriate website: AmazonGIS.org as well as AmazonGIS.com. Valdez, already a GIS user, has been full time director of the project since September 2000 with support from the W. Alton Jones Foundation. A steering committee initially consisting of biodiversity data holding developed country NGOs and others (such as ESRI and the National Geographic Society) has provided data and valuable counself. Developing country NGOs will be added soon. The Internet Map Server is a new and exciting way to disseminate knowledge, both mapped and non-mapped. The system already serves as a spatial gateway to a copious array of relevant websites. Others will be added. For example, it could link to the British Meteorological Office's Hadley Centre analyses projecting grave alteration to the hydrological cycle of the Amazon (and therefore its forests) by 2050, to the Amazonia Agenda 21 publication, and the multiplying information, literature, reports etc. about Amazonia. The presence of the of the system in the public Amazon Science Gallery, provide an opportunity for yet greater public engagement. For example, there already is a continuous real time display of images from the GOES fire detecting satellite.