Pantanal Matogrossense National Park

When I think about national parks I generally imagine little entrance booths where you have to pay, clearly marked trails, lots of tourists, and little informational placards about the physical and biological beauty that the park is protecting. Of course if you stray off the beaten path for some backcountry hiking or backpacking national parks can also represent vast expanses of wilderness to be explored, and, personally, these seconds types of experiences have been my favorite in many of the parks I have been to, but all the structure and information is something that I have tended to associate closely with any national or state parks that I visit.

It therefore came as a surprise to me that the Pantanal Matogrossense National Park is actually one of the least accessible places in the Pantanal. In my conversations with Ethan Shirley regarding my plans for the summer I remarked that I hoped to visit the national park to compare the level of weed invasion in this protected area with that of the more developed and ranched areas of the Pantanal near Poconé. He explained to me that, while it is possible to get to the park, you can only reach it by boat and there is really no infrastructure set up to explore it. Rather than the raised walkways and signs that will allow you to get up close and personal with some of the swampiest areas of the Florida Everglades, the national park in the Pantanal is characterized more by the complete lack of access and people. Thinking about this more I thought that this might actually be a good way of ensuring that a protected area was not degraded by tourist activities, but since it is also the case that there is almost not national park service presence in the area, it might be hard to keep tabs on whether or not people are actually entering the protected area or not.

As we have heard in class, the Pantanal is largely privately owned, resulting in this national park covering a tiny percentage of the park. In fact, even when combined with the SESC Pantanal Private Natural Heritage Reserve, a large privately protected area, and the other private reserves that have been set aside for environmental protection, the total conservation only adds up to about 5% of the area of the entire Pantanal. It will be interesting to explore such an interesting wilderness area on private land, rather than in a national or state park setting the way most of us are probably accustomed to. One thing we can think about going forward is how this lack of park service infrastructure might be a positive or negative for the ecology and preservation of the area.

Cole