assembling real terrain

Monumento Natural Barro Colorado · Panamá

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Viewpoint 9.15°N · 79.85°W Gatún Lake · Panama

Map key

Barro Colorado Nature Monument

Adjacent protected forest

Iconic wildlifetap a species ↗

Central American agouti

Ocelot

Mantled howler

White-faced capuchin

Geoffroy’s spider monkey

Brown-throated sloth

White-nosed coati

Collared peccary

Jamaican fruit bat

Fringe-lipped bat

Ocellated antbird

Leafcutter ant

Isthmus roads

Panama Canal Railway

Ranges are indicative — generated from a habitat rule in the literature, not sightings. Mammals span the whole monument; the spider monkey (reintroduced) and ocellated antbird are island-only.

Altitude bands · 23–190 m measured

Summit ridges140 m +

Island plateau100–140

Lower slopes60–100

Shoreline & drowned valleys26–60

Gatún Lake26 m

Bands are altitude, and here they are deliberately landforms rather than vegetation. The real division on this island is forest age — 909 ha of old growth, 929 ha of older secondary forest over 80 years, and 1,015 ha of younger secondary forest of 40–80 years across the monument (Dent & Elsy 2024) — and age does not follow contours.

Live · active fire

Active fire—24h

NASA FIRMS · VIIRS, Central America

10 km

Barro Colorado

The boundary · the record

Barro Colorado Nature Monument

An island of 15.4 km² and five mainland peninsulas, in a lake that did not exist before 1914. The shoreline drawn here is our own, traced from this map’s elevation model at the lake’s waterline, not OpenStreetMap: OSM maps the monument as a single smooth envelope wrapping the island, the peninsulas and the open water between them, enclosing 111.5 km² against roughly 54 km² of land. On a map whose whole subject is a shoreline, that envelope would have erased the point.

Monument: 54 km² STRI, published
Island: 15.4 km² STRI, published
Drawn: 19.5 km² our traced shoreline, +27%
Reserve: 1923
Monument: 1979
Elevation: 23 – 190 m measured on our DEM

Isolated in 1914 — the Chagres was dammed for the Panama Canal and the valley filled to 26.7 m, leaving a hilltop as an island
Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute — a biological reserve since 1923, and one of the longest continuously studied tropical forests anywhere
50-hectare Forest Dynamics Plot — every woody stem over 1 cm mapped and re-censused since 1980; the template for a worldwide plot network
Between 50 and 90 bird species originally recorded here have gone from the island — at least 70 of them from isolation itself rather than from the forest simply maturing.

Shoreline: traced by tools/trace_shoreline.py from this site’s own elevation model, cut at the Gatún Lake waterline (the lake is held at 26.7 m by the Autoridad del Canal de Panamá). It measures 19.5 km² against the 15.4 km² Smithsonian publishes — a 30 m elevation grid bridges the island’s many narrow inlets, which adds area. Use the drawn line to see the island; use STRI’s figures to state its size. The monument’s five mainland peninsulas are administrative lines no terrain model can recover and are not drawn. Area figures: Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. Neighbouring reserves: OpenStreetMap (ODbL).

Imagery: Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute orthomosaic (CC BY 4.0) · contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2021-2025) · Elevation: AWS Terrain Tiles · Monument boundary: Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute · Neighbours & water: OpenStreetMap (ODbL) · An independent visualization by Landseed — not affiliated with or endorsed by the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute