Visiting the Amazon Jungle
Priscilla (
San Marino
)
Visiting the Amazon Jungle in Ecuador – Priscilla’s goosebump moment
“Hi! I am Priscilla and I am from San Marino. My goosebump moment is when I was traveling in Ecuador and I went to the Amazon Jungle, and we wanted to do bird watching. So, you climb these really high towers, and we ended up on this tree, not like a normal thin tree, but one of those ginormous ones, and it had a platform on top so you can look at all the birds. When we went up to the top, the birds were amazing, but the most amazing thing is all the life that lived within this tree. It was just so amazing, we were in awe looking at every corner, every branch, and every little thing, there were so many animals that were living in it, and you could see the beauty of nature and how it is all connected. It was just an amazing moment that I remember very vividly”.
Amazon, wild and unknown
The Amazon, located in eastern Ecuador, is the wildest area of the country, an immense region and one of the least altered on the planet. It occupies more than a third of Ecuador’s territory and is home to very few human beings, almost all of whom belong to indigenous peoples.
The real wealth of this region is its overwhelming biodiversity. Inside the jungle live 50% of the country’s mammals and 5% of the Earth’s plant species. The Amazon region of Ecuador is thick, a garden with a great variety of plants.
Flora and Fauna of the Ecuadorian Amazon
The Oriente has the greatest diversity of flora and fauna in the Ecuadorian Amazon thanks to its location. It is one of the few protected areas in the entire world along the Ecuadorian line, where climatic conditions are more favorable to plants than in neighboring countries located at half the world.
In the Amazon, there is less of a difference between the rainy season and the dry season: even during the dry season, there is always rain, and so plants that cannot tolerate dry periods know how to survive, in addition to those that can tolerate less rainy periods.
The Amazon rainforest is so rich in species that it almost never shows many plants or trees blooming in abundance. Flowers appear unexpectedly, one jewel at a time.
Today more than 400,000 plant species have been identified for the rainforest and scientists continue to discover new species and give them rainforest plant names every day.
The most complete list of trees
The astronomical number of tree species found in the Amazon forests has fascinated ecologists, naturalists, taxonomists and evolutionary biologists for decades. Ecuador is one of the countries with the most endemic species, that is, species that do not exist anywhere else in the world, and many of them are found in the Amazon.
The quantification of this great diversity, which in plants is greater than in many animal groups, has proven to be a challenge. Nevertheless, the country has the most complete verified taxonomic list ever made, elaborated with the results of 20 years of floristic inventories, review of herbarium specimens and information from permanent monitoring areas. There are 2296 tree species in its Amazonian forests.
There is no data on the conservation status of 90% of the described species and it is estimated that between 42 and 63% of Ecuadorian Amazonian trees are still unknown to science.
More about the Amazon Jungle in Ecuador:
- The top 5 jungle lodges in Ecuador
- Exploring the Ecuadorian Amazon
- 10 amazing facts about the Amazon Rainforest in Ecuador
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