The remote, rugged Cabeceras Cofanes-Chingual is one of the last intact mountainous regions in Ecuador and serves as the most important remaining refuge for endangered, range-restricted flora and fauna of the Ecuadorian Andes. In October 2008 scientists from Ecuador, Peru, and the United States conducted a rapid biological inventory and a rapid social inventory to assess the region's suitability for protection as a municipal reserve. Working closely with local communities and indigenous Cofan, whose ancestral territory abuts the proposed reserve to the south, the teams surveyed the hydrology, geology, soils, vegetation and flora, fishes, amphibians and reptiles, birds, mammals, archaeology, and current human communities. Full and abstracted results of the fieldwork are provided in Spanish and English.
