Tambopata Chemical Ecology Institute

Tambopata National Reserve (TNR) is located in the heart of the tropical Andes and encompasses much of its diversity. TNR covers at least 14 different forest types, defined by soil and floristic traits, and TNR together with its neighboring Bahuaja Sonene National Park (BSNP) are home to 592 species of birds, 103 species of mammals, 74 species of reptiles, 127 species of amphibians, and 94 species of fish. The Tropical Andes region has vast numbers of insects, most of which are thought to be yet unidentified by science; in the TNR and the BSNP these include 1,234 species of butterflies, 152 types of dragonflies, 135 varieties of ants, 40 species of termites and 39 types of bees catalogued to date.

Research at Tambopata and other natural protected areas throughout the neotropics have been instrumental to our understanding of neotropical diversity. Studies conducted by the ecologist T.L. Erwin in the eighties comparing the occurrence of beetle species in two forest types in Tambopata and in four forest types in Manaus, Brazil led him to conclude that since only 9% of the identified beetle species in the former and 1% in the latter were shared, that the total number of insect species on earth must be an order of magnitude larger than previously thought, in the vicinity of 30 million. Likewise, estimates of tree and plant species of this region indicate that floral diversity is extremely high; in nearby Yanomamo, Peru, the ecologist Alwyn Gentry found that a single 1-hectare plot contained 283 species of tree, of which 63% were represented by a single individual.