Restoring Tierra Del Fuego | Chile & Argentina
Administración de Parques Nacionales, Argentina; Centro Austral de Investigaciones Científicas, Argentina; Ministerio del Medio Ambiente, Chile; Servicio Agrícola Ganadero, Chile; Universidad de Magallanes, Chile; and Wildlife Conservation Society (Chile and Argentina)
Forests are central to the heritage and economy of Chile and Argentina. While native forests are still common throughout Chile, less than a third of the country’s forests are frontier forests: mature, relatively undisturbed forests greater than 10,000 hectares. Those frontier forests represent important biodiversity, genetic, and ecosystem service reservoirs for the southern cone region. Yet, a non-native, alien species-beaver-threaten huge tracts of frontier forest and riverine ecosystems in southern Chile and Argentina. Beaver were introduced from Canada to Tierra del Fuego in 1946; over the past six decades, they have spread across the Tierra del Fuego Archipelago (7 million hectares), deforesting thousands of hectares of riparian areas. Alarmingly, they have recently colonized mainland Chile as their distribution and impacts spread northward. Beavers threaten the region’s ecological integrity, a number of ecosystem services—including the ability to sequester carbon and provide clean water—and the economy of the important ecotourism sector. The annual economic impact by beavers on road infrastructure alone in the region is over US$3 million.
In 2005, Chile and Argentina initiated a bi-national effort to control non-native beaver in southern South America. Those efforts resulted in a 2008 treaty with protocols between the two nations to restore sub-Antarctic ecosystems. The bi-national committee contracted a group of international experts, including Advanced Conservation Strategies, to conduct a feasibility study to assess whether beavers could be completely removed from the region, or if not, what other management options could be implemented. Based on recent successful large-scale invasive species removals in the United States and elsewhere, experts concluded that the removal of beaver from southern Chile and Argentina was feasible and necessary for the sustainable resource management of the Tierra del Fuego Archipelago. The removal of beaver is also critical to prevent the documented deleterious impacts from spreading north to mainland Chile and Argentina.
Advanced Conservation Strategies is working with a variety of Chilean and Argentine partners to develop and implement a large-scale program for the restoration of Tierra del Fuego region via the removal of invasive beavers.
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