Priorities for conservation of the biodiversity in the colombian Andes

Abstract

The present paper is written for the 1991 IUBS-Tropical Mountain Ecosystems seminar, to be held form the 9th till th 15th of december 1991 at the Uninversidad del Cauca and the Fundación Universitaria de Popayán, in Popayán, Colombia. The international seminar on "Tropical Mountain Ecosystem Functioning in America and Africa in relation to biodiversity and global change" will be a meeting point for experts dealing with african and latin american mountain ecosystems, especially on the subjects of biodiversity, ecological processes, global change and wise land management. The seminar is within the scope of the IUBS "Decade of the tropics" programme (Solbrig and Golley, 1983) and the International Program of Research on Tropical Mountain Ecology (Monasterio et al., 1987).

This paper, the conclusion and recomendations it contains, need to be discussed further, e.g. by the specialists gathered at the IUBS-TME seminar. To guide or initiate this discussion, the conslucions and recomendations of this study might be interpreted as a draft motion adressed to the colombian goverment, which aims at informing the colombian authorities to make additional and substantial conservation efforts in the Andes. Further disuccion could possibly take place in the IVth World Congress on National Parks and Protected Areas, schedueled for february 1992 in Caracas, Venezuel. This congress will review the whole question of the role of parks and other conservation areas in conserving global biological diversity. An indicatoin of the scope of the congress is given by the shift during the last years from the traditional protected area approach towards the wider context of multi-purpose land management. This recent approach sees the conservation of biological diversity as one of the most important general objectives of such management of rural areas. The "Biosphere Reserve" concept of UNESCO's Man and the Biosphere Programme (MAB) seems to fit into this approach, and might be a useful concept for implementation of priority areas for conservation in the context of the present study.

This document was written with the support from the ECOANDES programme, the Hugo de Vries Laboratory and the Institute for Texonomie Zoology, both of the Department of Systematics, Evolution and Palaeobiology (SEP), and from the Institute for Development Research Amsterdam (INDRA), University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

The information on this paper is not based on the author's own observations and research, bus is gathered form available literature. The conclusions and recommendations, however, are the author's opinions.

November, 1991.