An evaluation of the first inventory of South American wetlands

Abstract

Thanks to the efforts of the International Waterfowl Research Bureau, during 1982–1984, geographic and biotic data from 368 wetlands across South America were gathered. However, the conservation impact of this inventory has not been as striking as expected because of two reasons. First, since most contributors did not work for governmental agencies, the major points stressed in the document have been overlooked by local authorities. Second, because of logistic limitations of the inventory, large wetlands (i.e. those across the Amazon basin), were not inventoried using the IWRB criteria and thus considered as one large wetland. A critical, comparative, review of the results of the inventory revealed that in addition, the reliability of the inventory is questionable because of the differential effort put into the compilation of the information. Several countries appear to contain only a small percentage of South American wetlands, while in fact they have as many wetlands of international importance as countries that have many times their estimated area of wetlands.