Colombia, as a member country of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES, Article 17 of 1981), assumed the challenge of conserving biodiversity in situ, reducing the loss of habitat and its species. In this context and within the framework of the Regional Project for the Management, Monitoring and Control of Wild Fauna and Flora Species Threatened by Trade (Bioamazon Project); the Sinchi Institute is linked to contribute to the conservation of Amazonian Biodiversity and especially of the species included in CITES.
Since its creation, the Amazonian Scientific Research Sinchi Institute has focused efforts on consolidating biological collections that account for some of the components of the biodiversity of the Colombian Amazon (flora, fish, amphibians, reptiles and aquatic macroinvertebrates); as well as field monitoring actions that allow generating high-level information on the ecology, use and conservation of CITES species.
Colombian Amazon Herbarium (COAH)
Founded in 1983 by the botanist Miguel Antonio Pabón, it has had continuous growth thanks to great efforts to document the floristic diversity of the Colombian Amazon by the Sinchi Institute and other projects that have deposited their collections, to strengthen this reference collection of the regional flora.
After nearly four decades of continuous work, it has been possible to access innumerable locations, some of great biogeographical interest. At present, it has information on 120,000 vascular and non-vascular plant specimens represented in 9,200 species. Since 2005, the collection began to be digitized and it is currently available on the Sinchi Institute website.
About 30,000 species of plants in the world are protected by CITES against excessive exploitation due to international trade and are therefore included in the three CITES Appendices (CITES), the herbarium collection houses information on 279 species of plants of the Colombian Amazon (sensu stricto) included in the Appendices, among which species of Orchids and Arborescent Ferns are mainly registered. There are also two threatened species (Palo rosa, Aniba rosaeodora – Lauraceae and Cedro, Cedrela odorata – Meliaceae).
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