• A community-based monitoring project is helping protect the rich diversity of freshwater fish species in the Ramsar-listed wetlands in the Colombian Amazon.
• By combining ancestral knowledge with scientific tools, Indigenous Amazonian leaders say their communities are strengthening their connection to their territory.
• Community monitoring and training efforts have helped inform fishing regulations to better protect ecosystems and ensure the sustainability of local populations’ livelihoods.

The Ramsar board is a governing entity established by local communities and Indigenous peoples in the area following the Colombian government’s declaration of the EFI as a Ramsar site — a wetland of global importance — in July 2014. With that declaration, the country committed to the special protection of 253,000 hectares (625,000 acres) of wetlands, lagoons and bodies of water at the confluence of the three rivers. These rivers join the Ventuari River, on Venezuela’s side of the border, eventually feeding into the mighty Orinoco.

Colombia is one of the 172 countries that’s a party to the Ramsar Convention, an international treaty that seeks to protect wetlands as “a resource of great economic, cultural, scientific and recreational value, whose loss would be irreparable.” This is because of wetlands’ importance as regulators of hydrological systems and as habitats for a rich diversity of fauna and flora, especially aquatic birds.

The same year that the EFI was declared a Ramsar site, a management plan was formulated. Alongside the local Indigenous communities, the plan established a process to conduct fish monitoring to better understand the conservation status of the species on which the region’s Indigenous people rely for food.