Ecuador leads way in development of South American Tropical Research

Ecuador is leading the way in the development of South American tropical research, a recently released report from Tropical Conservation Science has found.

While research in the Andes range and the Amazon basin remains “scattered, patchy, and far below its potential,” the significant resources being invested in training young biologists and improving South America's academic infrastructure mean it could eventually overturn Central America's long-standing dominance of tropical biological literature.

Analysing all the scientific programs based in the Amazon or Tropical Andes in the period 1995-2004, the report found that Central America accounted for twice as many papers as the Amazon basin, and for nearly eight times more papers than the entire Andean range.

Three countries—Brazil, Ecuador, and Peru—accounted for 80.4 percent of all Amazonian research. Brazil was the most common base for Amazonian studies (49.0%), followed by Peru (18.9%) and Ecuador (12.5%).

Ecuador, however, far outstripped any other country in the region when the research effort was standardized by area.

Brazil, whose producing the highest amount of scientific material was attributed, in part, to its geographical size, performed worst of all the Amazonian countries in this sense. Had its number of publications per square kilometre matched Ecuador's, the report says, it would have produced more than twice as many articles as all other tropical countries in the world combined between 1995-2004.

As the tropical Andes Amazon region become more regarded locations for tropical research, it is important that scientists diversify their locations to avoid geographical bias, the authors say. One danger is“shifting the focus from a handful of well-studied sites in Mexico, Costa Rica, and Panama to a handful of well-studied sites in South America.

“A working understanding of South America's tropical forests does not require that biologists visit every last creek and hilltop,” it says, “but it does require that they have a clear picture of the biases that derive from the patchwork exploration of the landscape.”