Cauca Poison Frog (Andinobates bombetes)

Mohamed bin Zayed Species project number 162512859

Linking forestry and pastures areas in the conservation of the Cauca Poison Frog (Andinobates bombetes) in the Santa Rosa watershed

CORFOPAL is an NGO legally stablished in 1999 in Dagua municipality (Colombia), interested in the recovery, management and improvement of the Environment as a basic element for human development and survival. We are a group of people with common objectives and experience in the recovery and restoration of the hydrographic basin of the Dagua River. We see sustainability as a unifying element between man and the environment. The organization’s success is due to the jointed work with the different communities involved in each project, taking into account their needs, managing resources and working hand in hand with public and private organizations, in order to improve the conservation of the natural resources as well as the quality of life of the citizens and communities. The Geographical area of the project will be the Santa Rosa watershed (SRW) in the village of San Jose del Salado (on the Dagua River Basin). The main problem in this area is the loss of natural cover of the endangered dry forest (WWF, 2013) and its environmental attributes, because of the expansion of the agricultural frontier, promotion and implementation of clean crops like pineapple and ranching. This are also the main causes of biodiversity loss in the region. In this moment Corfopal is working in the implementation of landscape management tools (plans) in the SRW to increase natural forest cover and reconversion of production systems to releave the pressures that these exert on the biodiversity. One of the nine IUCN threatened species we find in this area is the Cauca Poison Frog (Andinobates bombetes) listed as Endangered because its extent of occurrence is less than 5,000 km2, its distribution is severely fragmented and there is continuing decline in the extent and quality of its habitat (IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, 2004). Our project intends to link forestry and pastures areas in the conservation of the Cauca Poison Frog (Andinobates bombetes) in the Santa Rosa watershed, through the evaluation of the effect two matrices have on the relative abundance of the frog, the establishment of stepping stones in these matrices to determine the dispersion level, and the implementation of educational workshops with the community.