Part III: Expanding Our Wings – The Future of Butterfly Monitoring
Discover how butterflies are helping scientists track climate change in the Amazon. Through a groundbreaking collaboration with park rangers and researchers, this project uses butterfly monitoring to protect one of Earth’s most biodiverse regions.
Expansion in Yasuni
We expanded our monitoring to another protected area in the Amazonia: Cuyabeno Wildlife Reserve. This expansion includes another type of a main ecosystem in the Amazonia, the flooded forests, which have become dried in the last months due to unprecedented droughts in the Amazonia.
An important milestone achieved is that experienced park rangers from Yasuni became workshop instructors in the field for new park rangers from Cuyabeno. This means they do not depend on researchers anymore to implement workshops for other people interested in joining our monitoring program.
Capacity Building
We have additional workshops planned for new park rangers. Park rangers from Cuyabeno have just started to monitor butterflies by themselves; they need additional training to identify complicated species (cryptic species) and develop their skills for databasing.
Continued Partnership
We are in the process of signing a new agreement with the Ministry of Environment in Ecuador to continue the collaboration to monitor butterflies in Yasuni and Cuyabeno for a period of two additional years.
Expansion
Our long-term vision is to expand the monitoring project to additional protected areas across Ecuador’s tropical forests and diverse ecosystems with the ongoing partnership of the Ministry of the Environment and collaboration with indigenous and local communities.
We are now meeting with the leadership of other protected areas managed by the Ministry of Environment, indigenous and local communities, and other NGOs to start working with them in this program. For example, we hope to begin working with indigenous Amazonian communities widely recognized for their leadership in the fight to protect their territories. These communities are very aware about the importance of monitoring biodiversity to strengthen conservation efforts, and they are interested in collaborating with our project to implement butterfly monitoring in their territory.
Be part of something bigger! Your support can help expand this successful program to more protected areas across Ecuador.
