Located 600 miles off the coast of Ecuador in the Pacific Ocean, the iconic islands are famed for their biodiversity and have been a living laboratory for the study of evolution for nearly two centuries. The islands are close enough to the mainland that plants and animals have managed to find their way to them. The islands are far enough from the mainland and from each other that once plants and animals arrive, they become isolated and evolve into new and unique species.
Much of the islands are protected by a national park. We created a reserve on San Cristobal, called Los Petreles, to protect the nesting grounds of the Critically Endangered Galapagos Petrel. The islands are surrounded by a marine reserve, created in 1998. We recently helped establish and then create a management plan for a new marine reserve connecting the Galapagos with Cocos Island in Costa Rica. Even with these levels of protection, many species are still threatened, and some have already disappeared. Today, invasive species are the biggest threat, and the most challenging to resolve.
On Floreana, the sixth largest island in the Galapagos, we are leading the most ambitious and important rewilding effort ever on an inhabited tropical island. Once we remove introduced invasive predators, like rats and mice, we will reintroduce 12 species that disappeared from the island generations ago, beginning with the Floreana Giant Tortoise. Read more here
The Podocarpus-El Cóndor Biosphere Reserve hosts a very special assembly of Andean ecosystems, humid forests of the El Cóndor mountain range, older than the Andes, and one of the few dry forests of the Amazon basin trapped between both. Nine of these eco [...]
The Chumbes program covers a region where there is a unique blending of wet Chocó ecosystems with Tumbesian and Andean dry forests. Like its ecosystems, the Chumbes name itself is derived from combining the Chocó and Tumbes names together. The Rio Jubones carved a 2,000-meter-deep g [...]
Thanks to its strategic location, this area is home to a unique variety of plants and animals that combine species from the Andes and the Amazon. Here, we seek to maintain the connectivity of an entire ladder of ecosystems, from the icy Andean peaks to the jungle of the upper Napo, giving species [...]
The Chocó forests of northwest Ecuador form part of one of the ten most important biodiversity hotspots globally. While the Chocó is almost as diverse as the much better-known Amazon basin, it is far more threatened by rapid deforestation.
