Ecological Region

The Santa Marta montane forests is an ecoregion in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, a massif on the Caribbean coast of northern Colombia. This montane ecoregion is a characteristic moist forest; however, it rises from very different habitat of xeric scrub and dry forest that surround it.

The Santa Marta páramo is an ecoregion containing páramo (high moorland) vegetation above the treeline in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta mountain range on the Caribbean coast of Colombia.

The Semiarid Pampas ecoregion is located in the center of Argentina. The predominant vegetation consists of grasslands with some shrubs. There are few endemic plants in the ecoregion but the area has a high biodiversity.

The Serra do Mar coastal forests ecoregion covers a 1000-km long by 100-km wide strip along the Atlantic coast of southeastern Brazil. The ecoregion represents the largest continuous block of montane Atlantic forest and a remarkable center of endemism in South America.

The Sinú Valley dry forests is an ecoregion in the north of Colombia. The region is known for its tremendous richness, in terms of biodiversity, due to the high number of species and level of endemism.

The Southern Andean Yungas is a tropical and subtropical moist broadleaf forest ecoregion in the Yungas of southwestern Bolivia and northwestern Argentina. It contains what may be the last of the isolated evergreen forests resulting from Quaternary glaciations.

The Southwest Amazon moist forests cover an extensive area of the Upper Amazon Basin. The inaccessibility of this region has kept most of the habitat intact. Also, there are a number of protected areas, which preserve this extremely biologically rich ecoregion.

The Talamanca Montane forests ecoregion is one of Central America's most intact habitats with very high species diversity. The ecoregion covers a discontinuous area within the highlands of northwestern Costa Rica and western Panama which is protected by numerous parks and reserves.