The Proyecto Primates field site is located in the northwestern corner of Yasuní National Park in the Amazonian region of Ecuador.  Established in 1979, the park is a more than one-million hectare reserve of primary, neotropical rainforest located south of the Río Napo.  The contiguous Huaorani Ethnic Reserve constitutes another 600,000 hectare parcel of primary forest set aside to protect the culture of indigenous Huaorani peoples and allow them to continue their traditional lifestyle of gathering, hunting, and small scale farming.  The park and adjacent Huaorani reserve are extremely rich in species diversity and were together designated a Man and the Biosphere Reserve by UNESCO in 1989.

Petroleum development in and around the northwestern corner of Yasuní began in the mid-1980s.  In 1986, the Ecuadorian government granted the U.S. petroleum company Conoco a concession to the 200,000 hectare parcel of land known as Block 16 which spans the border between the Huaorani Ethnic Reserve and Yasuní National Park.  Over the next several years, Conoco carried out seismic surveys within the block, drilled a number of small test wells, and eventually proposed a plan for extracting 150 million barrels of oil from the concession.  However, faced with strong pressure from environmental and indigenous rights groups, both in Ecuador and abroad, the company sold the concession in 1991 to their subsidiary Maxus Ecuador, Inc.

By 1993, Maxus Ecuador, Inc. began construction of the Pompeya Sur-Iro road which runs south and east from the Río Napo across the northwestern corner of the park and into the Huaorani Ethnic Reserve.  Prior to construction of the road, much of this region of the Ecuadorian Amazon was virtually untouched by humans -- the area had only been subject to only occasional human impacts by nomadic indigenous hunters.  The road corridor is in Yasuní National Park from kilometers 5 to 58; the more southern portion of the road lies in the Huaorani Ethnic Reserve.

In constructing the road, Maxus Ecuador, Inc. attempted to minimize potential impacts on the environment and to involve the scientific community in assessing what impacts the road did cause.  Care was taken to make as narrow a road corridor as possible, in part by using heavy, plastic webbing as the foundation of the gravel road rather than felling excess trees for this purpose.  The company contracted archaeologists to survey the entire road corridor before construction was begun, and botanists from the National Herbarium in Quito, organized by Dr. David Neill, made important collections of the unstudied Yasuní flora by sampling from the trees felled in the construction process.  Additionally, the company contracted a local environmental group, Ecuambiente, S.A., to monitor the ecological impacts of the road on the flora and fauna of the park and to study the efficacy of water quality maintenance, waste containment and cleanup procedures for three years during and after construction.

Thus in some ways, petroleum development has not been as devastating to the Yasuní ecosystem as it might have been. Most importantly, the oil company has been diligent about keeping nonindigenous colonists out of the region, mainly by preventing access to the Pompeya Sur-Iro road at its northern end at the Río Napo.  Given the history of deforestation and environmental degradation that often accompanies the colonization of new roads throughout the tropics, the importance of this anticolonization stance cannot be understated.  In Yasuní, however, the success of the anticolonization effort has been severely compromised by the fact that indigenous peoples are not prevented from moving along the Pompeya Sur-Iro road and hunting or establishing farms.  The damaging impacts of such indigenous colonists on the environment are virtually indistinguishable from those of nonindigenous colonists. 

Moreover, it is unclear what will happen in future years when access to the road is no longer controlled as tightly by the oil company, as stewardship responsibility over the road changes hands, or once oil extraction has been completed 10 or 15 years from now.  After finishing construction of the road and beginning to extract oil, Maxus Ecuador, Inc. sold the block 16 concession in 1995 to the Argentinean petroleum company Y.P.F. who sold the concession in 1999 to the Spanish petroleum company Repsol.  Given the number of families and farms already present in the region, it is somewhat unrealistic to imagine that the road will be removed as originally planned. 

As alluded to above, human subsistence practices within Yasuní National Park have significantly altered portions of the reserve -- most intensively in the northwestern region of the park along the Pompeya Sur-Iro road corridor.  Within the park borders, two indigenous groups -- the Quichua and Huaorani -- subsist by hunting and gathering forest resources and through swidden horticulture of introduced crops such as manioc and plantains.

Photos: Huaorani house and crops along the Río Tiputini, hunters with primate prey, woolly monkey foraging in Yasuní
 

South of the Río Tiputini, Huaorani families have moved to several sites along the road (kilometers 32, 58, and 102) and given up their traditional nomadic life ways for a sedentary lifestyle that involves more intensive hunting and clearing large areas of land for growing cash crops.  The population of the Huaorani community at the Río Tiputini has grown to well over 60 individuals individuals since 1993, and families from that community have recently cleared new areas for homes, moving south along the road corridor and away from the river.

Hunting and fishing for subsistence by Quichua and Huaorani has intensified with the use of rifles, shotguns and dynamite.  Furthermore, employment by the oil company is changing their traditional subsistence patterns and road and river transport to the town of Coca via oil company vehicles is producing demand for the Western consumer goods. This puts pressure on the local Huaorani to exploit Yasuní's forest resources (such as live parrots and monkey meat) for outside market forces, rather than for subsistence.  As noted in History, Proyecto Primates researchers found it necessary early on to develop an accord with local hunters to prevent hunting in the study site and to create a small protected area within the park from which mammals might one day emigrate to nearby impoverished areas.

The Proyecto Primates field site lies in the northwestern corner of Yasuní National Park, adjacent to kilometer 47 along the Pompeya Sur-Iro road and roughly midway between the Río Tiputini and the Río Tivacuno and the families of Huaorani living at those sites.  The site currently encompasses roughly 500 hectares of terra firme forest and consists of a series of rolling hills or knife ridges cut by a number of small but permanent streams that are part of the catchment area for the Río Tiputini.  The topography of the site is quite variable, with the change in altitude between ridge tops and stream beds sometimes exceeding 100 meters.  Nigel Pitman found that the knife ridges were 80% sand and that the soils associated with these ridges were composed of sand about 50% of the time.

Local forest composition within the study site varies considerably as well and may be associated with topographic characteristics such as slope incline.  At one extreme are areas of scrubby, regrowing trees tied together with vine tangles, such as those found on steep clay slopes where trees appear to be subject to a high rate of treefall.  Most of the forest, however, consists of areas of primary growth on stable ridges, shallower slopes, and basins where there is considerably heterogeneity in overstory tree height and a relatively thick understory.  Most overstory trees are 15 to 25 meters in height with a very few emergents reaching 35 to 40 meters.
 

Map of Proyecto Primates trail system and phenology transects

The site is bound on two sides by roads -- the Pompeya Sur-Iro road to the southeast and a smaller access road to the Capiron drilling pad on the northeast.  When the Proyecto Primates field site was developed, the forest was undisturbed with the exception of several small areas on ridgetops that had been cleared for use as helipads during seismic surveys in the mid-1980s.

To develop this area for primate observation and data collection, more than 40 kilometers of new trails were cut and three old seismic transects were reopened.  All trails were marked every 25 meters with flagging tape and were mapped using a hip chain, compass and clinometer.   In addition, five 10 by 1000 meter floristic transects were established for phenological monitoring.  All trees with a diameter greater than 10 cm at breast height within these transect were tagged for identification and observation.

Over the last few years, researchers and their assistants have periodically cleared trails and replaced tags on both trail points so that the integrity of the map is maintained for future studies.   Researchers are continually adding new trails to this system, trails that are specific to range use of their study species and groups.  Furthermore, over 2500 feeding trees have been tagged, measured and mapped over the course of several studies.  These trees also function as location points for data collection.  Most of the feeding trees have been identified to the generic or specific level, and voucher specimens of many have been collected and stored in herbariums.  Researchers maintain the database of trail and tree coordinates.   Finally, most of the trees tagged and mapped along the five hectares of phenology transects have been identified to the generic or specific level.  All databases are available to all researchers.

Since the onset of data collection on primates, many species within the study area have been habituated to human observers.  Woolly and spider monkeys are the most habituated since these two species have been the subjects of most study.  However, other species, such as sakis, tamarins, capuchins, and squirrel monkeys, have also been partially habituated through time.

More recently, Proyecto Primates opened ten 5-kilometer-long transects along the Pompeya Sur-Iro Road.  Transects are located each 9 to 10 kilometers perpendicular to the road in both the National Park and Ethnic Reserve.  Each transect will be surveyed biannually to monitor primate population levels in relation to human habitation and hunting intensity.

Scientists using the Proyecto Primates field site live at the Estación Científica Yasuní(E.C.Y.), a biological research station administered by the faculty of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Ecuador (P.U.C.E.).  The station is located 11 kilometers from the study site along a spur from the main petroleum road. 
 

Photos: Researchers working in the E.C.Y. laboratory, E.C.Y. housing, view of the Tiputini from E.C.Y. dock
 

To travel to the E.C.Y. from Quito, one can expect a 5 to 13 hour journey -- depending on whether a plane or bus is taken from Quito to the town of Lago Agrio in lowland Ecuador near the Colombian border.  From there, the journey continues as a series of taxi, bus, barge and car rides, all of which can be arranged by the P.U.C.E.  Researchers wishing to visit the E.C.Y. must have the necessary vaccines and permits to work in Yasuní and should visit the station's web site for more information. 

Researchers also work at the Tiputini Biodiversity Station. This station is several hours downriver from E.C.Y., and the site is administered by the Universidad San Fransicso de Quito under the scientific direction of Drs. Kelly Swing and David Romo. This station also has a very professional staff and amenities that allow researchers to easily collect data.