Dani E. Rivera González, Javier A. Maldonado Ocampo, Mario Pariona Fonseca, Jonh Jairo Mueses-Cisneros, Ana A. Lemos, Freddy Robert Ferreyra Vela, Adriana Bravo, Douglas F. Stotz, María Elena Díaz Ñaupari, Ashwin Ravikumar, Michelle E. Thompson, Robert F. Stallard, Alessandro Catenazzi, Debra Karen Moskovits, Lelis Rivera Chávez, Teofilo Torres Tuesta, Christopher C. Jarrett, Juan Díaz Alván, Nigel C. A. Pitman, Tomomi Suwa, Lily O. Rodríguez, Luis A. Torres Montenegro, Nélida Barbagelata Ramírez, Margarita Benavides Matarazzo, Gabriela Núñez-Iturri, Ítalo Mesones Acuy, Giussepe Gagliardi-Urrutia, Pablo J. Venegas, Nicholas Kotlinski, Tony J Mori Vargas, Lesley S. de Souza, Roosevelt García-Villacorta, Richard C. Smith, Amy Rosenthal, Diana Alvira Reyes, Cristian Ney Gonzales Tanchiva, Ana Rosa Sáenz Rodríguez, Alaka Wali, Álvaro del Campo, Marcos Ríos Paredes, Corine Vriesendorp, José Alvarez Alonso, Max Hidalgo, Rudolf von May, and Tatiana Pequeño
Since 2000, collaborative and multidisciplinary field inventories have helped quadruple park coverage in Peru’s richest region., Meeting international commitments to protect 17% of terrestrial ecosystems worldwide will require >3 million square kilometers of new protected areas and strategies to create those areas in a way that respects local communities and land use. In 2000–2016, biological and social scientists worked to increase the protected proportion of Peru’s largest department via 14 interdisciplinary inventories covering >9 million hectares of this megadiverse corner of the Amazon basin. In each landscape, the strategy was the same: convene diverse partners, identify biological and sociocultural assets, document residents’ use of natural resources, and tailor the findings to the needs of decision-makers. Nine of the 14 landscapes have since been protected (5.7 million hectares of new protected areas), contributing to a quadrupling of conservation coverage in Loreto (from 6 to 23%). We outline the methods and enabling conditions most crucial for successfully applying similar campaigns elsewhere on Earth.