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SANTA FE PROVINCE, Argentina — Only a decade ago, lagoons and floating green islands once surrounded this city, 300 miles north of Buenos Aires. Today, it is soybean plantations all the way to the horizon.

To see what remains of the ecosystem known as Argentina's humid pampas, Santa Fe residents either have to travel hundreds of miles, or they can visit a tiny fragment surrounded by modern buildings and crowded streets.

A miniature mosaic of wildlife, flora and marsh occupies the 29 acres of the Ecological Reserve of the National University of Litoral, created 10 years ago to preserve a small part of the humid pampas for future generations.

It is home to 140 bird species, including ovenbirds, saffron finches, Andean flickers, great kiskadees and great white egrets. White-eared opossums, otter-like rodents called coipos, Andean guinea pigs, and black and white Tegu lizards find refuge here among willows and ceibo trees, whose deep red blossoms are Argentina's national flower.

The Argentine pampas is really two ecosystems: the famous semi-arid grassland plains, an area the size of New Mexico, and the humid pampas, a wetland originally the size of Oregon. Together, they are habitat to 400 hundred species of birds, including many that seasonally migrate to North America.

Large parts of the pampas are in critical condition, according to Fernando Miñarro, grasslands program coordinator of Argentina's Fundación Vida Silvestre (Wildlife Foundation). Forty percent of the pampas has been dramatically transformed to make room for Argentina's major cash crop, soy.

Besides cultivated fields, a vast system of canals is being dug into the humid pampas from the Río Paraná, the second largest river in South America, so that cargo ships bound for North America, Europe, and the Orient can be loaded with soy.

Numerous Argentine scientists fear the soy monoculture will consume everything in its path, leaving only fringes of the pampas.

"To conserve Argentina's natural wildlife we must create refuges for them," says Pablo Tavares, vice-president of Fundación Hábitat y Desarrollo (the Foundation for Habitat and Development). "These ecosystems are like islands floating in a sea of industrial development."

His foundation has joined the National University of El Litoral and the Secretary of Environment and Sustainable Development of Santa Fe Province to develop the Islands of Santa Fe project: a comprehensive plan to protect the great wetlands of the pampas. They have proposed that 395,368 acres north of the city of Santa Fe that border the Río Paraná, including 15 islands, become Santa Fe's first national park.

However, Tavares fears with the growing world demand for soybeans, not even ecological reserves will be safe. If so, the 29-acre Ecological Reserve of the National University, surrounded by buildings and traffic, may be one of the last representatives of Argentina's wetlands.