Human settlement
The department counts 1.7 people per square kilometre (INEI, 2017 census), largely along the rivers. No population surface is drawn on this plate: the labelled places are the settlements, positioned from OpenStreetMap.
Connectivity
Buffer zones from Peru's national file (2006, edited 2011), supplied by a co-author of the paper. Each is the regulated strip around its park, drawn by its edges.
Global conservation value
The labelled stations are where the counts in this chapter were made: Cocha Cashu in Manú, Tambopata, Los Amigos.
Conservation History
Both concession layers come from the archive a co-author of the paper supplied on 28 September 2026.
Each concession block's harvest season, five-year plan and holder, as the file records them, are listed in the record.
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The landscape · the record
The Madre de Dios Landscape
Roughly 80,000 km² of southeastern Peru, from the Amazonian floodplain to the Andean crest. The landscape is an analysis unit rather than a gazetted area, and no authority publishes an outline for it, so none is drawn. The map shows its five constituent Peruvian protected areas, every ring from OpenStreetMap. The figures below are for Parque Nacional del Manú , the subject park.
Landscape ~80,000 km² the paper's unit
Manú, gazetted 1,716,295.22 ha D.S. 045-2002-AG
Manú, as drawn 17,054 km² OSM ring, measured
Boundary 817 km as digitised
Compactness 0.32 Polsby–Popper
Established 29 May 1973 D.S. 0644-73-AG
Elevation 282 – 3,978 m measured
UNESCO World Heritage — Manú inscribed 1987 under criteria (ix) and (x), property 1,716,295.22 ha, with a minor boundary modification in 2009. The Manu Biosphere Reserve around it was designated in 1977 at 2,438,956 ha and is drawn here as its own fainter ring.Peru's biodiversity capital, by statute — “Declarar al Departamento de Madre de Dios como Capital de la Biodiversidad del Perú” : Ley N° 26311, Art. 1, passed by Congress on 5 May 1994 and promulgated on 19 May. The designation applies to the department as a whole; the priority species were evaluated separately, against the criteria in SM Appendix B.3,696 m of relief inside one park. Measured from the Copernicus GLO-30 DEM against the OpenStreetMap ring, Manú runs 282 m to 3,978 m, and half of it lies below 460 m.
Why this landscape matters beyond Peru
One unbroken Andes-to-Amazon gradient. Very few protected areas anywhere hold a continuous, unfragmented transect from lowland rainforest to above the treeline. Manú does, and that is why the elevational surveys behind this page were possible: one 2025 study ran cameras from 245 m to 3,588 m in a single valley system.
Thirteen priority species, measured by camera trap. The Priority Species Index for this landscape covers thirteen candidate species, all thirteen in the index, over six survey years from 2017 to 2024: 78 species-year estimates in all. Each of the 78 species-year estimates carries its own 95% interval, shown when a species is opened in the panel. The estimates are occupancy , the proportion of surveyed sites where a species was detected, and show where an animal is, not how many there are.
Up 22 points on 2017, all of it before 2019. The index moved from 100 in 2017 to 129 in 2019 and has stayed between 116 and 129 since, an early gain followed by five years without a further rise. Every landscape in the study, this one included, holds at least one declining priority species; here it is Spix's guan, down from an index of 100 to 54.5.
A protected mosaic. Five Peruvian protected areas of three legal kinds — three national parks, a national reserve, and a communal reserve co-managed with Indigenous communities — under the biosphere reserve over the top of Manú, adjoining Madidi and Manuripi in Bolivia and five more protected areas in the Brazilian state of Acre. Twelve protected areas are counted across the region.
Every area figure on this page is labelled either gazetted or measured , and they are different numbers. Rings drawn from OpenStreetMap (ODbL): Manú rel. 11256967, Bahuaja-Sonene rel. 9645255, Tambopata rel. 9532933, Amarakaeri rel. 9650537, Alto Purús rel. 3874631, Manu Biosphere Reserve rel. 12252562. Areas, perimeters and compactness marked measured are computed from those rings on a sphere of radius 6,371.0088 km, at roughly 1 km generalisation, and are therefore scale-dependent — the true boundary is longer.
Gazetted extents come from the Decretos Supremos themselves , read as full text: Manú 1,716,295.22 ha (D.S. 045-2002-AG; the founding D.S. 0644-73-AG of 29 May 1973 states 1'532,806 ha), Bahuaja-Sonene 1,091,416 ha (D.S. 048-2000-AG Art. 2; the founding D.S. 012-96-AG states 537,053.25 ha), Tambopata 274,690 ha (D.S. 048-2000-AG Art. 1, as corrected by a Fe de Erratas of 10 September 2000), Amarakaeri 402,335.62 ha (D.S. 031-2002-AG), Alto Purús 2,510,694.41 ha (D.S. 040-2004-AG). Every one agrees with the measured area of its ring to within 1.5%, and four of the six to within 0.6%. World Heritage inscription and the 1977 biosphere-reserve designation are UNESCO's own; Ley N° 26311 is quoted from the Congreso de la República's own archive.
Elevation is measured, because no single published range exists for the park as it is now. The figure shown, 282–3,978 m , is measured from the Copernicus DEM GLO-30 inside the current OpenStreetMap ring and is labelled measured .
Species figures are the occupancy estimates of the manuscript's Supplementary Material, Table 6; the habitat rule behind each species' map markers is cited on its own card, and every DOI was verified against Crossref. Population and density: INEI, Censos Nacionales 2017.
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Connectivity · beyond the park boundaries
How the landscape connects
The index for this landscape is measured in logging concessions outside the parks. Whether the parks work as one landscape depends on the ground between them: the buffer zones, the rivers, and the forest either side of the Interoceanic Highway.
Protected areas, region 12 Peru, Bolivia, Acre · the paper
Buffer zones drawn 4 Peru's national file
Connectivity-important 4 of 13 species · SM Table 6
Cross-country potential 3 of 13 species · SM Table 6
Connectivity, species by species
Each candidate species was scored on nine criteria. The two that concern connectivity are given here for all thirteen species (SM Table 6).
Species Important for connectivity Cross-country potential
Giant armadillo No No Giant anteater No No Jaguar Yes Yes Lowland paca No No Lowland tapir No No Ocelot Yes No Pale-winged trumpeter No No Puma Yes Yes Razor-billed curassow No No Red brocket deer No No Short-eared dog No No Spix's guan No No White-lipped peccary Yes Yes
White-lipped peccary move through the landscape at landscape scale; the species card describes that movement.
Across the Río Heath
One river, two parks. Where the Río Heath is the Bolivia–Peru border, one bank is Madidi and the other Bahuaja-Sonene (Ayala et al. 2022).Tambopata is enclosed to the south. Peru's protected-area service describes the Tambopata National Reserve as contiguous with Bahuaja-Sonene, which surrounds it entirely to the south, and describes the connection between the department's protected areas and Bolivia's as what sustains the proposed Vilcabamba–Amboró corridor (SERNANP, Plan Maestro 2019–2023).The Vilcabamba–Amboró corridor. A binational corridor concept from the Vilcabamba range in southern Peru to Amboró National Park in central Bolivia, worked out at binational workshops in Lima in 1999 and again in July 2000 (CEPF portfolio review, 2004). No outline or area for it is drawn or stated here.Madidi and Manuripi. The two Bolivian areas are labelled at interior points of their OpenStreetMap relations.
What moves between the parks
Macaws. Satellite tags on 6 scarlet and 4 blue-and-yellow macaws from Tambopata, 2008–2016: outside the breeding season birds moved up to 150 km from their nesting areas, and most left the 1.36-million-hectare protected-area complex (Brightsmith et al. 2021).Giant otter. In the Manú floodplain, 1991–2006, 294 individuals were identified, 30 of them immigrants; young males mostly leave their family groups at about 3.0 years, females from as young as 1 year, and dispersers die at a high rate. The authors call for a giant-otter habitat corridor along the Río Madre de Dios (Groenendijk et al. 2014).In the unprotected matrix. On the Río Las Piedras, 293 camera stations from 2015 to 2022: lowland tapir occupancy was lower near agriculture, and jaguar avoided agricultural sites (Zwicker et al. 2025).
The Interoceanic Highway
Before paving. Across Madre de Dios, Acre and Pando, 1986–2005, the strong influence of deforestation in Madre de Dios reached about 18 km from the main roads, then unpaved; 89% of the three-country region was still stable forest (Southworth et al. 2011).After paving. In a 3,500 km² area around western Tambopata and the Río Malinowski, 20,641 ha of forest were lost between 2013 and 2018, 53% of it inside buffer zones; the authors conclude the highway's completion helped raise the rate (Nicolau et al. 2019).Forest value. Seven of fifteen forest-value measures increased with distance from the highway, though the effects were weak (Baraloto et al. 2015).
The buffer zones on this map
The dashed lines are Peru's zonas de amortiguamiento for Manú, Amarakaeri, Bahuaja-Sonene (which also serves Tambopata) and Alto Purús, from the national buffer-zone file in the archive a co-author of the paper supplied on 28 September 2026. The file dates from 2006, last edited in 2011, and current limits may differ.
Manú 2,798 km² buffer zone · measured
Amarakaeri 2,849 km² buffer zone · measured
Bahuaja-Sonene 4,510 km² buffer zone · measured
Alto Purús 4,352 km² buffer zone · measured
The same archive holds Peru's national protected-area file, whose record of the eight areas on this plate is below. The rings come from OpenStreetMap, and the gazetted areas stated elsewhere on this page come from the decrees.
Category Name Legal basis Legal area, ha
Parque Nacional Manu D.S Nº045-2002-AG 1,716,295.22 Parque Nacional Bahuaja Sonene D.S. 048-200-AG 1,091,416 Reserva Nacional Tambopata D.S. Nº 048-200-AG 276,490 Reserva Comunal Amarakaeri D.S Nº031-2002-AG 402,335.62 Parque Nacional Alto Purus D.S Nº 040-2004-AG 2,510,694.41 Reserva Comunal Purus D.S Nº 040-2004-AG 202,033.21 Santuario Nacional Megantoni D.S Nº030-2004-AG 215,868.96 Santuario Histórico Machupicchu D.S Nº001-81-AA 32,592
From the paper's authors (the 2026-09-29 draft supplied to Landseed; unpublished and under review): the twelve protected areas and the Madidi and Manuripi border, Supplementary Material Appendix A; the connectivity and cross-country scores, Supplementary Material Table 6. From a co-author's archive, 28 September 2026: Zonas_amortiguamento (Peru's buffer zones, SINANPE, 2006, edited 2011), reprojected from UTM 19S and checked against the archive's earlier WGS84 buffer file; sinanpe geo wgs (Peru's protected-area file, 2011). Buffer-zone areas are measured on a sphere of radius 6,371.0088 km. Published: Ayala, G. et al. 2022, Revista de Ciencias Ambientales 56(2):1–16, doi:10.15359/rca.56-2.1. SERNANP, Plan Maestro de la Reserva Nacional Tambopata 2019–2023. CEPF 2004, Portfolio Review: Vilcabamba-Amboró Conservation Corridor. Brightsmith, D.J. et al. 2021, Avian Conservation and Ecology 16(1):14, doi:10.5751/ACE-01822-160114. Groenendijk, J. et al. 2014, PLoS ONE 9(8):e106202, doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0106202. Zwicker, S. et al. 2025, Frontiers in Conservation Science 6:1648851, doi:10.3389/fcosc.2025.1648851. Southworth, J. et al. 2011, Remote Sensing 3(5):1047–1066, doi:10.3390/rs3051047. Nicolau, A.P. et al. 2019, Environmental Research Letters 14:124045, doi:10.1088/1748-9326/ab57c3. Baraloto, C. et al. 2015, Biological Conservation 191:674–681, doi:10.1016/j.biocon.2015.08.024. Label positions for Madidi and Manuripi: OpenStreetMap relations 420485 and 447057 (ODbL).
Conservation history · for the people who manage it
What was done here, and when
The instruments that made this landscape, the one recorded intervention, and the monitoring that followed. Each entry names its source.
Intervention record
2015 Concessions logging concessions granted
2017 and 2019 FSC certification, the two concessions
Supplementary Material Appendix F: "Logging concessions granted in 2015. Forest Stewardship Council certification in 2017 and 2019 for the two concessions." These are the concessions the camera-trap data come from, drawn in amber.
The 129 blocks in the co-author's file
The amber lines are the 129 records of the concession file the co-author supplied. The file merges five source layers, so each block carries only its own layer's fields, and a blank below is a blank in the file. The blocks are annual cutting areas from successive five-year plans, so they overlap and their areas are not added up.
Blocks by harvest season (zafra), as the file records it:
All 129 blocks
Block Layer Sector Season Five-year plan Holder Contract Legal area (ha) Mahogany Area as drawn (km²)
Protection, instrument by instrument
1973 — Parque Nacional del Manú gazetted, D.S. 0644-73-AG, 29 May 1973.1977 — UNESCO designates the Manu Biosphere Reserve.1987 — Manú inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage property, criteria (ix) and (x).1994 — Ley N° 26311 declares the Department of Madre de Dios the Capital de la Biodiversidad del Perú, promulgated 19 May 1994.1996 — Parque Nacional Bahuaja-Sonene gazetted, D.S. 012-96-AG.2000 — Reserva Nacional Tambopata gazetted and Bahuaja-Sonene extended, D.S. 048-2000-AG. The same year, Ley N° 27308, the forest and wildlife law of 15 July 2000, creates exclusive concessions for non-timber forest products such as Brazil nut (Art. 10a) and for conservation (Art. 10b).2001 — The Los Amigos Conservation Concession is granted, on 6 July 2001 according to its holder, which describes it as Peru's first conservation concession; drawn in green.2002 — Manú's current extent, D.S. 045-2002-AG; Reserva Comunal Amarakaeri, D.S. 031-2002-AG; the Reserva Territorial Madre de Dios for peoples in isolation, R.M. 0427-2002-AG.2004 — Parque Nacional Alto Purús, D.S. 040-2004-AG.2005–2012 — The Interoceanic Highway: concession contracts signed 4 August 2005, paved 2006–2011, the Madre de Dios section in operation from 30 March 2012.2015–2019 — The survey's logging concessions, and their FSC certification.
The Los Amigos Conservation Concession
In the supplied file 146,051 ha the file's own attribute
As drawn 1,464 km² measured
The concession's polygon comes from the archive a co-author supplied. The polygon was reprojected from UTM 19S and checked against the bounding box in the file's metadata; the measured area of the drawn shape agrees with the file's area attribute to 0.3%. The Los Amigos research centre, labelled on the map, sits on the river just outside the drawn line.
Brazil-nut concessions
The Brazil-nut concession system was launched in Madre de Dios in 2000 under Ley N° 27308. As of 2017 the regional forestry authority had 1,123 Brazil-nut concessions registered outside protected areas, and the protected-area service reported 85 inside the Tambopata National Reserve and 13 in the buffer zone of Bahuaja-Sonene; concessions outside protected areas ranged from 24 to 4,373 ha, averaging 860 ha (Willem et al. 2019). None is drawn here.
Giant otter monitoring at the cochas
No giant otters were moved here. The population recovered on its own after the pelt trade ended, as the censuses below record. The three series were counted by different methods over different areas and are listed separately.
Years Area counted Result
1991–2006 Manú floodplain: 230 river km, 20 core oxbow lakes and 11 more 43 otters observed in 1991, 80 in 2005, 69 in 2006; breeding groups rose from 7 to 12 between 1991 and 2000. The authors describe the population as still recovering from the pelt trade. 2014 and 2015 Madre de Dios basin: 130 lakes and streams, 1,561 river km 128 otters counted in each year; 106 (2014) and 114 (2015) inside protected areas. 2007–2023 Manú at reduced survey effort; four lakes in Amarakaeri; the unprotected mining corridor Manú 25–57; Amarakaeri from 8–10 in 2018–2019 to 15–20; the mining corridor from 37 to 6–12.
From the paper's authors (the 2026-09-29 draft supplied to Landseed; unpublished and under review): the intervention record, Supplementary Material Appendix F. From a co-author's archive, 28 September 2026: the logging concessions (ConcessionsExport) and the Los Amigos Conservation Concession (ConcesionPoly). Instruments: the Decretos Supremos and Ley N° 26311 as cited in this site's park record; UNESCO's own entries for World Heritage site 402 and the Manu Biosphere Reserve; Ley N° 27308, Ley Forestal y de Fauna Silvestre, Congreso de la República, 15 July 2000; the Interoceanic Highway dates from Peru's Ministry of Transport, Caballero Espejo, J. et al. 2018 (Remote Sensing 10(12):1903, doi:10.3390/rs10121903) and OSITRÁN. Los Amigos grant date and "first": the holder, Asociación para la Conservación de la Cuenca Amazónica (ACCA), on its own website; the granting resolution itself was not read. Brazil nut: Willem, H.V., Ingram, V. & Guariguata, M.R. 2019, International Forestry Review 21(2):254–265, doi:10.1505/146554819826606540. Giant otter: Groenendijk, J. et al. 2014, PLoS ONE 9(8):e106202, doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0106202; Mendoza, J.A. et al. 2017, Revista Peruana de Biología 24(2):155–162, doi:10.15381/rpb.v24i2.13493; Barocas, A. et al. 2025, Ecological Indicators 179:114265, doi:10.1016/j.ecolind.2025.114265.
Global conservation value · the evidence
Why it matters beyond Peru
Every figure here is a published count, given with the area it covers and its date. Comparisons with other regions are given only where the source makes them.
World Heritage 1987 Manú · criteria (ix), (x)
Biodiversity capital 1994 Ley N° 26311 · the department
Bird species 1,005 Manu Biosphere Reserve · 2006
Mammal species 222 Manu Biosphere Reserve · 2006
Amphibian species 155 Manú NP and buffer · 2013
Reptile species 132 Manú NP and buffer · 2013
Tree species, one hectare 204 Cocha Cashu plot · 1988
Relief inside Manú 3,696 m measured
What each count covers
Birds and mammals. Lists for the whole Manu Biosphere Reserve, combining earlier records with a 1999–2001 survey of eight sites between about 450 and 3,550 m. The authors write that the lists of 222 mammals and 1,005 birds "are the largest for any similarly sized area in the world" (Patterson et al. 2006).Amphibians and reptiles. Species known or suspected in Manú National Park and its buffer zone, 150 to 4,200 m (Catenazzi et al. 2013).Trees. All stems of at least 10 cm diameter in single one-hectare plots: 204 species at Cocha Cashu in Manú, 185 at Cabeza de Mono, 181 on terra firme and 165 on alluvial soil at Tambopata (Gentry 1988).Relief. 282 to 3,978 m inside Manú's OpenStreetMap ring, from the Copernicus GLO-30 elevation model.
The landscape in the study
The landscape. A refuge for large Neotropical mammals, including jaguar, giant river otter and a diverse primate fauna, supporting one of the world's richest tropical floras.Species found nowhere else. Of the index species, the short-eared dog occurs nowhere outside the Amazon basin, and the pale-winged trumpeter and razor-billed curassow are restricted to the south-western Amazon of Peru, Brazil and Bolivia.An index with its own interval. This landscape is one of two in the study for which a confidence interval can be reported around the index itself.The most robust index in the leave-one-out test. Removing any one species at a time changed this landscape's index by 2.7% on average, against 8.5% to 37.2% for the four other landscapes tested.Potential landscapes in Peru. Peru has 27 potential Priority Species Landscapes larger than 1,000 km² (880,188 km² in total), 16 larger than 2,000 km² (865,034 km²) and 10 larger than 5,000 km² (848,101 km²). SM-Table 4, derived from the WDPA (UNEP-WCMC), used for this paper by permission.
From the paper's authors (the 2026-09-29 draft supplied to Landseed; unpublished and under review): the landscape description and species ranges, Supplementary Material Appendix A; the confidence interval, the manuscript's methods; the sensitivity test, Supplementary Material Appendix C. Designations: UNESCO World Heritage Centre, site 402; Ley N° 26311, Congreso de la República del Perú. Counts: Patterson, B.D., Stotz, D.F. & Solari, S. 2006, Mammals and birds of the Manu Biosphere Reserve, Peru, Fieldiana: Zoology n.s. 110:1–49, doi:10.3158/0015-0754(2006)110[1:MABOTM]2.0.CO;2 (abstract, English text); Catenazzi, A., Lehr, E. & von May, R. 2013, Biota Neotropica 13(4):269–283, doi:10.1590/S1676-06032013000400024; Gentry, A.H. 1988, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 85(1):156–159, doi:10.1073/pnas.85.1.156. Relief: measured from Copernicus DEM GLO-30.
