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The Huancabamba Depression is an east-west depression through the Andes Mountains of northern Peru. The Huancabamba Depression interrupts the Central and Eastern Cordilleras of the Andes, and the Marañón River and its tributaries drain eastward through the depression into the Amazon basin. Western Cordillera has its lowest point, 2145 meters, at the Paso de Porculla.
Peru, officially the Republic of Peru, is a country in western South America. It is bordered in the north by Ecuador and Colombia, in the east by Brazil, in the southeast by Bolivia, in the south by Chile, and in the west by the Pacific Ocean. Peru is a megadiverse country with habitats ranging from the arid plains of the Pacific coastal region in the west to the peaks of the Andes mountains vertically extending from the north to the southeast of the country to the tropical Amazon Basin rainforest in the east with the Amazon river.
The Marañón River is the principal or mainstem source of the Amazon River, arising about 160 km to the northeast of Lima, Peru, and flowing through a deeply eroded Andean valley in a northwesterly direction, along the eastern base of the Cordillera of the Andes, as far as 5° 36′ southern latitude; from where it makes a great bend to the northeast, and cuts through the jungle Andes, until at the Pongo de Manseriche it flows into the flat Amazon basin. Although historically, the term "Marañon River" often was applied to the river all the way to the Atlantic Ocean, nowadays the Marañon River is generally thought to end at the confluence with the Ucayali River, after which most cartographers label the ensuing waterway the Amazon River.
The Amazon Basin is the part of South America drained by the Amazon River and its tributaries. The Amazon drainage basin covers an area of about 6,300,000 km2 (2,400,000 sq mi), or about 35.5 percent that of the South American continent. It is located in the countries of Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Peru, Suriname and Venezuela.
The Huancabamba Depression is home to the Marañón dry forests, which form both a biogeographic connection between the lowland forests of the Pacific coast and the Amazon basin, and a biogeographic barrier between the Northern Andes and the Central Andes. [1]
The Marañón dry forests (NT0223) is an ecoregion in northern Peru. It covers the lower valley of the Marañón River and its tributaries along the eastern edge of the Andes. It has a dry climate due to rain shadow from mountains further east. The habitat has long been modified by farming, ranching and logging and is now threatened by construction of hydroelectric and irrigation dams.
Biogeography is the study of the distribution of species and ecosystems in geographic space and through geological time. Organisms and biological communities often vary in a regular fashion along geographic gradients of latitude, elevation, isolation and habitat area. Phytogeography is the branch of biogeography that studies the distribution of plants. Zoogeography is the branch that studies distribution of animals.
