Support Our Work In Bolivia With your help, we can protect places around the world like Bolivia's cloud forests.   Jaguars are one of the many animals found in the Tariquía-Baritú Ecological Corridor.   Cloud forests are a type of rainforest that occurs on high mountains in the tropics, generally between 6,500 and 11,500 feet. Cloud forests are so named because they are often shrouded in mist and fog. The high moisture level and cool year-round temperatures foster plant communities rich in mosses, ferns, and epiphytes. Extensive cloud forests in the Tariquía and Baritú reserves serve to condense water vapor and produce rain.  They also regulate and purify the water, providing an important ecosystem service to over 40 communities in Bolivia and the northern Salta region of Argentina.

The area between Tariquía Natural Reserve and Baritú National Park is known as the Tariquía-Baritú Ecological Corridor. The corridor extends over 1.4 million acres and is the single largest protected area of tropical foothills, also known as Yungas, in the Southern Andes. The landscape is covered by forests and grasslands.

Location. The bi-national ecological corridor is made up of the Tariquía Reserve and Alarachi Natural Reserve in Southern Bolivia, and Baritú National Park in northern Argentina.

Animals. The forests of the corridor are home to a wealth of mammals such as spectacled bears, jaguars, ocelots, anteaters, brown capuchin monkeys, nine-banded armadillos, brocket deer and tapirs.

Andean condors, giant hummingbirds, whistling herons, Chilean flamingos, red shovelers, white-rumped hawks, osprey, great egrets, scaly-headed parrots, Andean pygmy owls, spot-billed ground tyrants, toucans and Bolivian military macaws are among the 240-plus bird species in Tariquía alone. Besides harboring many of these species as well, Baritú is also a home for the world's largest eagle, the harpy eagle.

Fish such as dorado, sábalo, robal and surubí thrive in the rivers and lakes. Commercial fish like sábalo and surubí find themselves in national fish markets in cities as far as La Paz, some 500 miles away.

Plants. Scientists have recorded 247 plant species in Tariquía. Native trees and large shrubs thriving here include South American cedar, red Brazil cherry, guayabi, pine of the hill,  quinine, wild walnut and laurel. In Baritú, giant ferns up to12 feet high can be found.

Why The Nature Conservancy Works Here

Besides overfishing, threats to Tariquía and Baritú include timber harvesting, oil prospecting, lack of clear park boundaries, and the building of access roads. Poor agricultural practices such as overgrazing, burning forests for cultivation, insufficient crop rotation and growing crops on steep slopes all cause severe problems with erosion.

What the Conservancy is Doing

Under the Parks in Peril program, supported by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the Conservancy and partner organization PROMETA have been working in Tariquía Reserve since 1994. Initial work focused on transforming the Reserve from a "park on paper" into a functioning and healthy reserve. This has involved conservation planning and management, research and monitoring, and environmental education.  In order to extend the habitat of endangered species like the spectacled bear and jaguar, the Conservancy, in a second phase of the project, decided to help PROMETA buy lands to form the Alarachi Natural Reserve and close the nine-mile gap between Tariquía and northern Argentina’s Baritú National Park. With the creation of the cross-border ecological corridor, the Conservancy is focusing its efforts on:

• Identifying critical threats to the corridor and updating the corridor’s conservation area plan.

• Building institutional and public participation to secure the future of the corridor through the design and implementation of a communications strategy that highlights the benefits of the Corridor to local communities and other stakeholders in both Bolivia and Argentina.

The Tariquía-Baritú Ecological Corridor project is one of a number of projects that form part of The Conservancy’s Parks in Peril multi-site program which receives financial support from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and seeks to strengthen conservation efforts in parks and protected areas at the local and system wide level, working with civil society organizations, private landowners as well as local and national governmental bodies.

Nature picture credits (top to bottom, left to right): © Ivan Arnold/TNC (Tariquia Reserve); © Ivan Arnold/TNC (Musaceae plant, member of the banana family); © Wayne M. Bennett (Jaguar); © Ivan Arnold (cloud forest).