Natural Resource Management in Amazonian Indigenous Reserves

Indigenous territories currently account for 54% of all reserves by acreage across all nine Amazonian countries, and overall cover approximately 50% of the forest area of the Colombian Amazon. Such reserves play a key role in protecting and preserving tro pical forest biodiversity against logging, agricultural conversion and wildfires. However, hunting, collection of other non-timber forest products, and fishing is legally permitted, often without a rational set of guidelines or a management plan. The curr ent project aims to quantify the dependency and use of natural resources by indigenous communities in the Colombian Amazon and provide data to inform the sustainable harvest of these resources. During the report period we have been working closely with 72 households across 4 villages in two contiguous indigenous reserves; the Resguardo Aduche and Resguardo Nonuya de Villa Azul. Daily reports on harvest of game animals, fish and plant materials have been conducted and we currently have approximately 30.000 registers for a 1-year period. Registers for an additional 6 months are currently being entered into spreadsheets. Preliminary analyses suggest that the communities are very dependent on fish resources with 128 species of fish species recorded, but the m ajority of biomass extracted belongs to a handful of important species. Terrestrial game animals dominate the hunting profiles, but aquatic game animals and invertebrates are also surprisingly common in the registers.

Indigenous territories currently account for 54% of all reserves by acreage across all nine Amazonian countries, and overall cover approximately 50% of the forrest area of the Colombian Amazon. Amazonian indigenous reserves therefore play a key role prote cting and preserving tropical forest biodiversity against logging, agricultural conversion, wildfires and resource exploitation. However, harvest systems through hunting, collection of other non-timber forest products, and fishing are legally permitted wi thout a rational set of guidelines or a management plan. Hence, harvest-sensitive species have been driven to local extinction or decline in several indigenous and other multiple-use, sustainable development reserves. The key question, therefore, is wheth er a spatially structured harvesting system can be made politically and culturally viable over the long term. This project aims to develop a spatially-structured sustainable co-management protocol to inform the use of game vertebrates