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In November of 2021, I led 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. The story of Centinela was central to the origin of our modern concept of global biodiversity hotspots, and the pinning of western Ecuador as one of the 'hottest' of these extremely biodiverse and imperiled areas.
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 were eliminated.
In 2021, we showed this is erroneous.
We found stands of healthy, intact forest, rediscovered "extinct" species, and continue to find species new to science. There is still time to save Centinela and its seemingly endless biological wonders from the extinction we were warned of decades ago.
So, now we are focused on conservation alongside our botanical investigations. 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.
Deforestation is also not done and gone, and Centinela's forests are still critically endangered, but our research and this story are a powerful inspiration for wilderness preservation in Ecuador and globally.
Please check out our Centinela website to learn more and participate in conservation action: bit.ly/vivacentinela
You can also learn more from our scientific articles:
Rediscovery of Gasteranthus extinctus L.E.Skog & L.P.Kvist (Gesneriaceae) at multiple sites in western Ecuador: https://doi.org/10.3897/phytokeys.194.79638
- Refuting the hypothesis of Centinelan extinction at its place of origin: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41477-024-01832-7
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