page_title: Amboró National Park
section_title: Flora
hierarchical_section_title: Amboró National Park / Flora
caption_attribution_description: English: Tree ferns in the Amboró National Park, Santa Cruz, Bolivia. Deutsch: Baumfarne im Amboró-Nationalpark in Santa Cruz, Bolivien. Español: Helechos gigantes en el parque nacional Amboró, Santa Cruz, Bolivia.
context_page_description: Amboró National Park in central Bolivia is a nature reserve with over 912 species of birds, over 177 mammalian species including puma, ocelot, and the rare spectacled bear. Covering an area of 4,425 km², it is protected from human settlements, hunting, mining and deforestation, though problems with all these still exist within the park. The Carrasco National Park is placed adjacent to Amboró, and together the two form a larger conservation unit.
context_section_description: Parque Nacionál Amboró is one of the most botanically rich national parks in the world. The current number of documented plant species totals around 3,000, though this is almost certainly an underestimate. By comparison, the much more thoroughly documented and very biologically rich Hawaiian Island archipelago, which covers about six times the total area of Parque Nacional Amboró, has only about 2,800 native plant species, while the British Isles (covering about 65 times the area of Amboró) have only around 2,000. Even the entire California Floristic Province, one of the world's botanical biodiversity hotspots, contains only 8,000 plant species—about 2.5 times as many as Amboró—though it covers an over 170 times larger. Much of the biodiversity of Amboró is partitioned according to the park's highly dissected topography and the widely varying climatic regimes that accompany the sharp transitions in elevation. Vegetational diversity is equally exceptional within the park, with lowland forests, montane forests, yungas and cloud forest, subpáramo, montane and non-montane scrublands, pampas, cactus forests, palm forests, forests composed almost entirely of treeferns, bromeliad-laden cliffs, epilithic subalpine plant communities, and others. The ecotones between these vegetation types are often sharply delineated according to aspect and elevation, yielding a highly heterogenous landscape that can make traveling in the park a dramatic and surprising experience.
  Another factor contributing to the park's high plant species richness is its location at the confluence of several diverse and unique floristic regions: the tropical Amazon lowlands and pampas to the north and southeast, the subantarctic high Andes and altiplano to the west and southwest, the subtropical Tucumano-Boliviano forests to the south (these forests do not actually reach Amboró but many of their constituent species occur within the park), and the semiarid inter-Andean valleys and wet-tropical yungas forests that characterize the eastern slopes of the central Bolivian Andes. Due to the difficulty of the terrain and the almost complete lack of infrastructure throughout the park, much of it has never been botanically surveyed, and it is essentially beyond doubt that many more plant species await discovery within the park's more remote regions. The high rates of endemism throughout the tropical Andes (Amboró is no exception) suggest quite strongly that at least some of the undocumented plant species yet to be discovered within Amboró will almost certainly be Amboró endemics that are currently unknown to science.
  Of the documented species, some of the most ecologically and economically interesting are bigleaf mahogany, mountain pine, black walnut (no relation to the eastern North American tree of the same name), limachu, q'illu q'illu (Berberis bumaelifolia, also spelled khellu khellu), cebillo, bibosi, ambaiba, pacay, and clavo rojo. In the cloud-enveloped forests there are extensive patches of giant tree ferns. In addition, there are pachiuva, açaí palms and many species of endemic orchids.
caption: Amboro is noted for its many large ferns.
exif: {"Image Make": "Panasonic", "Image Model": "DMC-FZ5", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "72", "Image YResolution": "72", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Ver.1.0", "Image DateTime": "2014:08:26 21:19:06", "Image YCbCrPositioning": "Co-sited", "Image ExifOffset": "418", "Image PrintIM": "[80, 114, 105, 110, 116, 73, 77, 0, 48, 50, 53, 48, 0, 0, 14, 0, 1, 0, 22, 0, ... ]", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "6804", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "10602", "Thumbnail YCbCrPositioning": "Co-sited", "EXIF ExposureTime": "1/30", "EXIF FNumber": "14/5", "EXIF ExposureProgram": "Program Normal", "EXIF ISOSpeedRatings": "100", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0220", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2014:08:26 21:19:06", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "2014:08:26 21:19:06", "EXIF ComponentsConfiguration": "YCbCr", "EXIF CompressedBitsPerPixel": "4", "EXIF ExposureBiasValue": "0", "EXIF MaxApertureValue": "3", "EXIF MeteringMode": "Pattern", "EXIF LightSource": "Unknown", "EXIF Flash": "Flash did not fire, compulsory flash mode", "EXIF FocalLength": "6", "EXIF FlashPixVersion": "0100", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "1600", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "1200", "Interoperability InteroperabilityIndex": "R98", "Interoperability InteroperabilityVersion": "[48, 49, 48, 48]", "EXIF InteroperabilityOffset": "6652", "EXIF SensingMethod": "One-chip color area", "EXIF FileSource": "Digital Camera", "EXIF SceneType": "Directly Photographed", "EXIF CustomRendered": "Normal", "EXIF ExposureMode": "Auto Exposure", "EXIF WhiteBalance": "Auto", "EXIF DigitalZoomRatio": "0", "EXIF FocalLengthIn35mmFilm": "36", "EXIF SceneCaptureType": "Standard", "EXIF GainControl": "None", "EXIF Contrast": "Normal", "EXIF Saturation": "Normal", "EXIF Sharpness": "Normal"}