How a Citizen Science Organization Aims to Preserve the Places It Brings Tourists to Study

Key points

• Deep in the Peruvian Amazon, the Tamshiyacu Tahuayo Regional Conservation Area boasts enormous biodiversity—pink dolphins, rare monkeys, giant river otters, reptiles, and hundreds of birds and different types of plants.
• It’s also one of the most prominent examples of a government recognizing that environmental conservation doesn’t require keeping people out.
• That instead, it’s possible for humans to coexist with nature and help protect it.
• And the region’s protected status is supported, in part, by research conducted by tourists.
• Biologist Richard Bodmer has been welcoming visitors to his research station along the Yarapa River, on a strip of Indigenous territory between Tamshiyacu Tahuayo and another area co-managed by Indigenous communities, the Pacaya-Samiria Reserve, to help track wildlife and collect other ecosystem data for decades.