User talk:Laurenwhitehurst/sandbox

Comments from Emily

[It's not clear from your sandbox how you plan to integrate your information with the existing page on Yasuni National Park, as some of the information already there is fine. The map and photos definitely need to be retained. Your page also lacks quite a bit of standard Wikipedia formatting; please make sure you fix this before migrating your content (e.g., headers, sections, and references need to be properly formatted). The in-text references are also frequently not formatted correctly.]

Yasuni National Park (Spanish: Parque Nacional Yasuní),[1] with an area of 9,823 km2, is located between the Napo and Curaray Rivers in Napo and Pastaza Provinces in Amazonian Ecuador. The national park lies within the Napo moist forests ecoregion and is primarily rain forest. The park is about 250 km from Quito and was designated a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve in 1989. It is also within the claimed ancestral territory of the Huaorani indigenous people. Yasuni is home to two uncontacted indigenous tribes, the Tagaeri and the Taromenane.[2] Many indigenous people use the riverways for traversing the land as a main way of travel. Several waterways in the area are tributaries that lead into the Amazon River, including blackwater rivers high in tannins boasting vastly different floral composition than the main riverways [need a citation for this statement]. The spine-covered palm, Bactris riparia[1], typically lines the edges of these slow moving rivers, often referred to as igapós.[2]

Research Station [good to mention this, but it should be placed farther down, after the biological information]

This is an image of the grounds at Yasuni Research Station in Ecuador, located in Yasuni National Park along the bank of the Tiputini River.

Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador located in Quito, operates the Estación Científica Yasuní (ECY) [comma needed] a research station located within the reserve. The station is located in the heart of pristine Amazonian rainforest, close to villages of local, indigenous peoples and provides opportunities for research in one of the most biodiverse places in the world through offering room and board options and [not a complete sentence. And this reads like an advertisement for the station, please be sure your language is neutral.] . The station is situated along the banks of the Tiputini River.

Biodiversity

Yasuni National Park (YNP) is arguably the most biologically diverse spot on earth [this absolutely requires a citation!] and a convergence point for three unique regions, the Equator, Andes Mountains, and the Amazon [all of these need to link to the appropriate wikipedia pages]. The park is at the center of a small zone where amphibian, bird, mammal, and vascular plant diversity all reach their maximum levels within the western hemisphere. Moreover, the park breaks world records for local-scale (less than 100 km2) tree, amphibian, and bat species richness, and is one of the richest spots in the world for birds and mammals at local scales as well.[3] [this reference is not formatted properly] Within the northwest region of the park is a Forest Dynamics Plot, a 50 hectare research plot created in 1995 by a collaboration between Pontificia Universidad Católica de Ecuador (PUCE), the University of Aarhus in Denmark, and ForestGEO-STRI [this sentence is not really relevant in a section on biodiversity. I would recommend naming the section currently above this one something like "Scientific resources", moving it down lower, and then putting this sentence in that section with the information on the research station. That would be a more logical arrangement.].

Mammals [all the names in this section need to be linked to wikipedia pages]

Water puddles with mineral rich clay are where many animals and insects congregate to obtain minerals they cannot obtain otherwise.

Many types of mammals live within the national park both in water and on land. Pteronura brasiliensis, commonly known as the Giant Otter, is an endangered species endemic to rivers in and surrounding the national park are forced to adjust to constant [please fix the grammar here, this is not a logical sentence]'Bold text' seasonal changes in water levels that concurrently alter food availability. A species of bat, Lophostoma yasuni, is endemic to the park. Many species of monkey spend their lives coexisting among the tops of the canopy, including the Eastern Ecuadorian Squirrel (Saimiri cassiquiarensis), Pygmy Marmoset (Cebuella pygmaea), Ecuadorian White-fronted Capuchin (Cebus aequatorialis), Red-crowned Titi (Plecturocebus discolor), Napo Saki (Pithecia napensis), Colombian Red Howler (Alouatta seniculus), White-bellied Spider Monkey (Ateles belzebuth), and Humboldt’s Woolly Monkey (Lagothrix lagothricha). These creatures are key components to many trophic levels of the ecosystem as they serve as seed dispersers and remove insects from plants for nourishment.

Herpetofauna

The Yasuni River is home to many different species of caiman.

In spite of covering less than 0.15% of the Amazon Basin, Yasuni is home to approximately one-third of the amphibian and reptile species [do you mean of the Amazon? Then please say that explicitly]. The park holds a world record 150 amphibian species for places with comparable landscapes, and high amphibian diversity compared to other sites sampled in the western Amazon.[3] The total of its amphibian species is more than the United States and Canada combined [that is likely true of any place in the tropics, doesn't seem worth mentioning to me]. Treefrog Osteocephalus yasuni is named after the park.[4] Reptile species in the park are also very high with 121 documented species found, making it a particularly interesting area to study herpetology.

Fish

The park harbors high levels of fish diversity, boasting an estimated 500 species.[3] However, this may be an underestimate of the amount of species actually present due to cryptic diversity [this probably has a wikipedia page, no?], differences not easily seen morphologically but revealed using DNA studies, amongst species [sentence fragment, remove]. The diversity of fish species in this region is influenced by seasonality and habitat, which is important for consideration when trying to capture the breadth of species encompassed in the waterways [why is this here? not appropriate for a wikipedia entry].

Birds

Yasuni is also home to at least 596 bird species which comprises one-third of the total native bird species for the Amazon. [Why are you discussing bats in a section on birds?? You have a mammal section above, move the bat sentences there] The park is also rich in species of bats. On a regional scale, the Amazon Basin has an estimated 117 bat species, but on a local scale, Yasuni is estimated to have comparable richness [what is the overlap in those species counts? Does this mean all 117 bats found in the Amazon occur in this park?. According to a field guide composed by PUCE, the area surrounding the Yasuni Scientific Research Station contain a large diversity of bird species including various predatory birds like falcons, hawks, and eagles and other birds such as macaws, antwrens, manakins, thrushes, and many other species. The diverse levels of canopy available have supported many different lifestyles for birds, including pollinators like hummingbirds who can often share close relation with certain plant groups.

Insects

Yasuni National Park hosts a large diversity of insects.

This national park hosts very high levels of insect diversity and insect-plant mutualisms. In a single hectare, Yasuni has over 100,000 different species of insects which is roughly the amount of insect species that can be found in all of North America. [citation needed]

Plant Diversity

The park also boasts one of the world's richest levels of vascular plants. It is one of nine places in the world that has over 4,000 vascular plant species per 10,000 km2. The park contains many species of trees and shrubs and holds at least four world records for documented tree and liana richness as well as three world records for diversity in woody plant species [all of these statements need citations!]. Several recent book publications in coordination with PUCE have provided comprehensive information about plant species within the Yasuni region, one of which details 337 plants, predominantly trees, endemic to the Yasuni Region. The park also hosts a list endemic species such as 43 different species of vertebrates [grammar issue in this sentence, and vertebrates should not be mentioned in a section on plants. Put that in the animal section with an appropriate citation.] and 220–720 different plant species.[3]

Other threats to the park [do you plan to fill in any of these additional sections?]

Colonization, deforestation, illegal logging, and unsustainable hunting are affecting the park at present.[14]

See also

Finding Species

Tiputini Biodiversity Station

Comments from Erick

I like your topic because this is a good place to do research. It will be a good article to find information about this national park in Ecuador. I would like to see the final version of it because you will add valuable information about flora, fauna (including insects), river drainage system?, the Yasuni Research Station and indigenous people. So, my suggestions are as follow: 1) In flora, it would be helpful to include plant systematics of the area (composition of vegetation), and geographical distribution if this is possible. I think this information is useful for botanists and entomologists that want to do more research in there. 2) Under insect’s section you could include studies of butterflies that have been done there. Specifically, people from the McGuire Center at the Florida Natural History Museum have done research and advised PhD student from Ecuador (Maria Fernanda Checa) and other American students on biodiversity and phylogenetic studies. Currently, I am part of a fruit fly team (Diptera: Tephritidae: Anastrepha) doing surveys at the Yasuni Station and neighboring areas to discover biodiversity, and to do adults and larvae taxonomy and systematics (morphology and molecular). Also, some researchers have done studies of termites. Finally, one last important topic here is that Dr. Terry Erwin has done fogging to estimate number of insects on earth, so there is some literature you could find and add information about it. 3) Under Yasuni Scientific Research Station, you could include information about the 50Ha plot which is run by Dr. Renato Valencia (Botanist at PUCE University in Quito). They have published some books about plants from this plot that you could cite. Also, I have pictures of Huoarani people serving our traps and myself if you would like to include them in your article – if this ok, let me know to provide some pictures to your article. Great article! AnaSystem2019 (talk) 01:56, 1 April 2019 (UTC)