Ecuador is a relatively small country (about half the size of France or 283,561 km²) with an extremely varied geographical landscape and extraordinary biological diversity (MAE 2010a). Ecuador is considered to be one of the world’s megadiverse countries (Mittermeier et al. 1997) and the Amazonian region includes large tracts of intact natural forest of global conservation significance (Bass et al. 2010).

Ecuador is divided into four distinct biogeographic regions: the Amazon, the Andes, the Pacific coastal plain and the Galapagos Islands. The vast majority of forest biomass - approximately 10 million hectares - is in the Amazon region (80%), with about 13% near the coast and the remaining 7% in the Andean highlands (Stern & Kernan 2011). The country has...