New Mining Concessions Will Severely Decrease Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services in Ecuador
bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/251538; this version posted January 22, 2018. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under aCC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license. New mining concessions will severely decrease biodiversity and ecosystem services in Ecuador 1 2 3 1 by Bitty Roy , Martin Zorrilla , Lorena Endara , Dan Thomas , Roo 1 4 1 5 Vandegrift , Jesse M. Rubenstein , Tobias Policha , Blanca Rios-Touma 1 Institute of Ecology and Evolution, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR 97403 2 Nutrition Technologies Ltd./Research Institute of Biotechnology and Environment, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam 3 Department of Biology, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611 4 Department of Geography, University at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY 14261 5 Grupo de Investigación en Biodiversidad Medio Ambiente y Salud -BIOMAS- Facultad de Ingenierías y Ciencias Agropecuarias, Universidad de Las Américas, Quito-Ecuador. Abstract Ecuador has the world’s highest biodiversity, despite being a tiny fraction of the world’s land area. The threat of extinction for much of this biodiversity has dramatically increased since April 2016, during which time the Ecuadorian government has opened approximately 2.9 million hectares of land for mining exploration, with many of the concessions in previously protected forests. Herein, we describe the system of protected lands in Ecuador, their mining laws, and outline the scale of threat by comparing the mammals, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and orchids from several now threatened protected areas, classed as “Bosques Protectores” (BPs), in the NW montane cloud forests.
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