Amazon Conservation Association

The Amazon Conservation Association (ACA) protects biodiversity by generating conservation-relevant knowledge about Andean-Amazon ecosystems and developing innovative conservation tools to protect lands and waters that support the livelihoods of local communities. With this grant, ACA partners with Amazon Conservation Team to expand application of a successful near-real-time monitoring system from Peru across the tropical Andes and into the Amazon. The program strategically analyzes large data sets from remote sensing to produce concise and user-friendly syntheses about threats to forests and freshwater, which facilitate policy and conservation action by enforcement agencies and civil society. In Peru, this approach has led to quick management responses by government agencies in at least six cases over the last two years. Expanding the program to Colombia, Ecuador, and Bolivia has the potential to protect hundreds of thousands of hectares of forest, key biodiversity areas, and reduce threats to the headwaters of the Amazon. New technologies and analyses, including radar, address water sources and services, climate change impacts, and global drivers of biodiversity loss, in addition to deforestation.

The Amazon Conservation Association (ACA) protects some of the world's most diverse landscapes in Peru and Bolivia, trains the next generation of Amazonian conservationists, and partners with communities to support livelihoods that sustain biodiversity. This project expands upon and improves an aquatic monitoring program in the Upper Madre de Dios watershed, providing indigenous communities and Manu National Park management with the skills and knowledge required to monitor water quality important for human health and fisheries. ACA also is piloting a replicable system for incorporating water flow and quality into natural resource management and climate change adaptation planning.

Amazon Conservation Association is a science-based conservation organization that has protected 1.5 million hectares of Amazonian rainforest in Peru and Bolivia for 11 years. The activities directly funded by this project will allow ACA to collect data on aquatic resources in the Upper Madre de Dios watershed, provide indigenous communities with the skills and knowledge required to monitor fish populations important for their livelihoods, and share the methodology and results in a transparent way with government, indigenous communities and the oil extraction sector in order to mitigate impact of dam construction and hydrocarbon extraction activities.

To build conservation capacity within the Tacana indigenous community to protect the Pampas de Heath wilderness in Northern Bolivia (over two years).

In support of research and conservation of the Pampas del Heath in Madidi National Park buffer zone, Bolivia (over three years).