Amazon Basins
Occupying more than 6.8 million km2, the Amazon Basin is the largest river basin in the world and nearly twice the size of the Congo Basin, in Africa, the second largest.
Although some do not consider the Tocantins Basin to be part of the Amazon Basin, it flows to the southern area of the Marajó Bay, in the great Amazon River Estuary –therefore it is geographically and ecologically connected to the Amazon system.
Map: Wildlife Conservation Society, 2016.
Pan-Amazon Basins
The new Pan-Amazon basins classification (Venticinque et al., 2021) addresses the challenge of conservation at scale, and offers a useful spatial reduction to make integrated analysis of the aquatic, semi-aquatic and land systems at the Amazon Biome scale, or at different hydrographic scales.
Pan-Amazon basins and percentage of the total area of the Pan-Amazon. (Eduardo Venticinque, Bruce Forsberg, Ronaldo Barthem, and Michael Goulding, 2021). Map: Wildlife Conservation Society 2024.
Dowload the table with basins and percentages
ESTUARY & COAST
The Estuary
Marajó Bay
Amapá Coast
Marajó Island
AMAZON MAIN STEM
The Main Stem
Uses & Impacts
Protected Areas
MAIN RIVER BASINS
Caquetá-Japurá
Juruá
Madeira
Marañón
Napo
Negro
Purus
Putumayo-Içá
Tapajós
Tocantins
Trombetas
Ucayali
Xingu