Panama’s Mamoní River valley is, a 45-square-mile valley that includes the Mamoni Valley Preserve and the Cocobolo Nature Reserve, protects an important ecological asset: Continuity of the flow of biodiversity through the narrowest point of the Americas (just 37 miles between the Pacific and the Caribbean), via the Darien Gap that connects Panama and Colombia.
More specifically, the valley lies at the northern end of the Tumbes-Choco-Magdalena Bioregion, one of the Top 25 most biodiverse places in the world and home to thousands of unique species that exist nowhere else in the world.
It’s also a critical link in the Meso-American Biodiversity Corridor, a heterogeneous chain of parks, preserves, indigenous lands, and privately held territories that connect sensitive rainforest habitats, which ensures the maintenance of biodiversity by allowing the flow of organisms and reducing inbreeding.
Located just 90 min northeast of the capital of Panama City, nestled between the primary rainforests of Chagras National Park and the Guna territory, the valley also helps to protect one of the most important upland watersheds (the Mamoni River) along the narrowest portion of the Panamanian Isthmus.
Until the 1960s, the valley was covered in lush tropical rainforest and teeming with life. Beginning in the 1960s, with the passing of the Panamanian homesteading act, it was reduced logging, ranching, and farming, reaching its peak extent of deforestation (~30%) in the year 2000.
Today, deforestation extends from the Pacific Coast to the northern end of the valley, where the Mamoni Valley Preserve buffers the primary forest of the Guna territory. Deforestation here is unsustainable for neither this bioregion and biological corridor nor the human communities that depend on the rainforest in Madroño.
Further, when the land is deforested, torrential rains strip the soil and carry it and manure into the streams that feed the Mamoní River, endangering the watersheds and harming fragile riparian species across the valley.
Locally, there are very few wetlands — fertile areas that flood and host different species from the surrounding forest — which makes the Caracol Basin Restoration Project particularly significant from a biodiversity perspective.
The Caracol Basin is a 76-acre strip of eroding cattle pasture that was deforested in 1980s, but is now regrowing and strengthening the Tumbes-Choco-Magdalena Bioregion as a whole, by supporting the connectivity of the primary and secondary rainforest habitats that abut it. The Caracol Basin is being naturally seeded with native species such as fruit bats and birds that fly over the land, with little physical restoration activities required, because it is mostly surrounded by forest.
The Mamoní River valley’s rainforest communities are difficult to access, and suffer from a lack of investment. Even so, they are rich in natural resources, resilient, and adaptable. Together—and given the right opportunity and resources—the communities of Mamoní and Madroño can be part of the healing of the rainforest. We can strengthen the biological corridor, restore wetlands, protect the forest and the upper Mamoní River Basin… in a way that increases our quality of life and enriches the land for future generations.