 The conservation corridor is really a spatial and social ecological strategy to combine biodiversity conservation and sustainable land use in such a way that really extensive areas can be incorporated into a corridor and places can be connected so that there are avenues and routes and opportunities for animals to migrate and to disperse and for plants and seeds to be able to similarly disperse and so that really it's a way of connecting fragments or patches of smaller conservation areas into a much larger hole. So the idea of a corridor is a really complex one right it's a it's a it's a spatial strategy on one hand I've tried to talk about you know what are really massive areas the one of the they're about six absolutely huge and most vital conservation corridors in the world and one of those is in the central Andes it connects central Peru and central Bolivia it's called the Vilcanota-Amburo corridor it runs from the areas north of Cusco both in the Andes and in the Amazon across the Lake Titicaca basin down into the Manu and the Medidi immense biosphere reserves and into central Bolivia so this is about 800 miles that arguably is the most biologically diverse place in the world but not just for various forms of mammals plants and animals and amphibians etc but also for domesticated plants so here we have six thousand types of potatoes are being grown this is where the biodiversity of agricultural plants is among its most concentrated nuclei in the entire world. One environmental issue that I become very aware of as I started what working in southeast and Peru was road building in the Amazon this is something that's been going on for a long time especially in what in eastern Brazil ecological impacts of the road are very real and this is something that from the planning the conservation planning efforts in the region we've been involved with in certain different levels and trying to understand the connectivity to habitats in the region looking at sort of quarter ideas to hopefully maintain connections across the road because and it's a common thing in the rainforest in the eastern Amazon that they saw the first impact of any new road was very rapid changes along the road because now the forest along the road were easier to cut down the timber that was there was a lot easier to access to turn into its board products and chuck it out of there the scientists have been working in Porto Maldonado for easily for 10 years have been anticipating the impact of the road and trying to work with the companies to mitigate the impacts of the road itself so as you proceed up the highway different communities were identified based on the amount of hunting that they already did the animals that they saw and trying to identify okay by using this local knowledge to identify some of the best places to preserve the forest or restore the forest to help maintain connections the road company itself did but buy into a lot of the ideas and where it was appropriate tried to construct underpasses in the road that would allow for some of this connectivity the larger animals that they're still uncertain whether that they would typically use this kind of an underpass because they weren't very wide when you talk about conflicts in the region probably a good place to start actually is some of the primary stressors so the two we have the most experience with really our timber production and gold mining and we've worked quite a bit on gold mining so if you really look on particularly alluvial gold mining which is small-scale gold mining done on a lot of these headwaters of the Amazon in a lot of these basins so it really creates a couple of different conflicts one is quite simply the conflict with conservation planning because a lot of that alluvial gold mining is done so to speak illegally in the conservation corridors or actually on park land adjacent to parks and so that's a conflict it also creates a lot of social tension because really what it asked people to do was there's been a tremendous migration of people from the Andes down into the rainforest so what happens as a consequence of that that means that people arrive in the rainforest in fairly large numbers and they've grown up in an environment which is completely different right they've grown up in a high altitude not a lot of vegetation and all of a sudden they're in the rainforest where things are look incredibly closed in and dense and so they bring land use practices with them that are totally inappropriate to the environment so they don't they live very close to the river they don't move far inland they have a tendency to clear because they don't like that that closed in feeling it's all important in terms of environmental quality livelihoods lifestyle food health for the communities and people who live in and near the protected areas we can't expect them it would be extraordinarily unjust as well as just blatantly unfeasible to suggest that people and communities in and near protected areas would sort of give up and sacrifice given you know under any conditions but maybe especially given how poor many of these people already are you know they can't be expected to make sacrifices in order to better the situation of the protected area so what