¡Viva Centinela!

In November of 2021, Nigel Pitman of the Field Museum and I joined an A-Team of colleagues from Ecuador and beyond to search for surviving forest fragments in one of Latin America's most notorious sites of endemism and extinction: the Centinela Ridge.

An extra-Andean mountain ridge in western Ecuador, Centinela was inventoried by legendary botanists Al Gentry and Cal Dodson in the 1970's and 1980's. They reported extraordinarily diverse forests holding dozens of plant species found nowhere else on Earth. Unfortunately, they claimed, these forests were felled, converted to agricultural fields, and their endemic species likely extinct.

This is erroneous.

We found large stands of healthy, intact forest, rediscovered "extinct" species, and continue to find species new to science.

In 2023, we received funds from the Mohammed Bin Zayed Species Conservation Fund and Franklinia Foundation to contract two botanists to help us survey and inventory the remaining forest fragments at Centinela. We have also teamed up with Fundación Jocotoco to use these funds to establish a reserve at Centinela, reforest pastureland, and collect and plant seeds from endangered tree species. 

Please check out our Centinela website to learn more and participate in conservation action: bit.ly/vivacentinela