Considered the richest and most diverse region on Earth, the Tropical Andes region holds nearly 20 percent of the world’s plants and animal species in less than 1 percent of the world’s land area and maintains the largest variety of amphibians on Earth. The Tropical Andes region features habitats of mist cloud forests, high altitude grasslands, mangroves, coral reefs, and dry forests. It still holds ecosystems that are largely intact though it is estimated that no more than 25 percent of the total Tropical Andes region’s original vegetation remains. Climate change, unsustainable agriculture and cattle ranching practices, infrastructure projects, illegal hunting and mining, inappropriate logging and political instability continue to threaten the biodiversity, health, and ecological integrity of the region’s rivers.

Conservation strategies in the area include increasing land areas and indigenous communities under protection, mitigating the direct effects of infrastructure development and resource extraction, providing clean drinking water to urban centers, and working with landowners to implement more-sustainable cattle-grazing, agricultural and fisheries practices, and to conserve freshwater resources.  People depend on the region’s rivers as a source of fresh water, food, and hydropower energy. The DN Batten Foundation is particularly interested in payment for ecosystem services strategies (e.g. downstream users of drinking water paying upstream landowners for practices that keep the water clean), which have been pioneered in this region.