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Yasuni National Park


Yasuni National Park is a national park in Ecuador that lies on 9,820 km2 between the Napo and Curaray rivers in Napo and Pastaza provinces in Amazonian Ecuador, around 250 km from Quito. The park was designated a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve in 1989. It is within the claimed ancestral territory of the Huaorani indigenous people.

The national park lies within the Napo moist forests ecoregion and is primarily rain forest.

Yasuni National Park is arguably the most biodiverse spot on Earth. The park is at the center of a small zone where amphibian, bird, mammal, and vascular plant diversity all reach their maximum levels within the Western Hemisphere. Moreover, the park breaks world records for local-scale (less than 100 km2) tree, amphibian, and bat species richness, and is one of the richest spots in the world for birds and mammals at local scales as well.

However, Yasuni National Park is threatened by oil extraction and the colonization, deforestation, illegal logging, and unsustainable hunting that accompanies oil-access routes.

The bat Lophostoma yasuni is endemic to this park.

Drilling controversy

There has been extensive controversy over the construction of "oil" roads for the exploitation and production of petroleum within the park. Famous scientists including Jane Goodall, E.O. Wilson, and Stuart Pimm have protested against this construction.

Since June 2007, the Ecuadorian government has been promoting the Yasuni-ITT Initiative, a revolutionary proposal that seeks to leave the Ishpingo-Tiputini-Tambococha (ITT) oil fields untapped under the core of Yasuni National Park in exchange for compensation from the international community for lost revenue.

References

Greenberg, J. A., S. C. Kefauver, H. C. Stimson, C. J. Yeaton, and S. L. Ustin. 2005. Survival analysis of a neotropical rainforest using multitemporal satellite imagery. Remote Sensing of Environment 96(2):202-211.

Hennessy, L. A. (2000). Whither the Huaorani? competing interventions in indigenous Ecuador. Masters thesis, Berkeley, University of California, Berkeley.

Lu, F. E. (1999). Changes in subsistence patterns and resource use of the Huaorani Indians in the Ecuadorian Amazon. PhD dissertation. Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Pitman, N. C. A. (2000). A large-scale inventory of two Amazonian tree communities. PhD dissertation. Durham, Duke University.

External links

Yasuni Green Gold Campaign to save the park and its indigenous people

Yasuni Campaign by New Internationalist

Save Yasuni video by New Internationalist

Yasuni National Park

Oil exploitation in protected areas

Campaign site to prevent exploitation of the ITT block in Yasuni National Park

Sign the petition to prevent exploitation of the ITT block in Yasuni National Park

Uncontacted: A field study of the Huaorani, who live in Yasuni National Park

Justicia Now: Documentary Film about ChevronTexaco's oil disaster in Ecuador and the country's campaign to preserve the Yasuni

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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article Yasuni National Park


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