Latest news from Centinela

Clapping

In mid-September, many members of our team reunited in a successful effort to deliver live plants of the Critically Endangered wildflower Gasteranthus extinctus to Ecuador’s Padre Julio Marrero Botanic Garden (PJMBG), with the goal of establishing a global conservation population that will guarantee the species’ long-term survival. Fieldwork focused on two tiny forest fragments—some of the last remnants of Ecuador’s coastal cloud forest and the only place on Earth where G. extinctus grows. These fragments are smaller than a typical city park and surrounded by cattle pasture, but they remain spectacular landscapes: everwet cloud forest on precipitous mountainsides bathed in the spray of a dozen waterfalls, the highest of which tops 120 feet.

The team was led by the same group that rediscovered G. extinctus in 2021: Field Museum Associates Dawson White (now a post-doc at Harvard), and Juan Guevara (a professor at Ecuador ’s Universidad de las Américas), and Mellon Senior Conservation Ecologist Nigel Pitman. Our 16-person team included two staff members of the PJMBG (which is part of the Catholic University of Ecuador), our expert botanists Andrea Fernández and Juan Carlos Cerón, three officials from the provincial government’s conservation agency, two members of Ecuadorean conservation group Fundación Jocotoco, John Clark of Marie Selby Botanical Gardens, and Harvard PhD student and ethnobotanist Justin Williams. These fragments are home to dozens of other globally threatened plant species, many of which the team was were able to deliver to the PJMBG (which is located about 20 km from the fragments, in the provincial capital of Santo Domingo). These include the Endangered tree Carapa megistocarpa, the long-lost and recently re-discovered Endangered treelet Amyris centinelensis, the tree Browneopsis macrofoliolata, and a dozen other gesners.

Over five long days of field work and five late nights of pressing plants the team collected more than 400 herbarium specimens of around 300 plant species, which will be deposited in two Ecuadorean museums and the Field Museum’s Searle Herbarium. They took several hundred live plant photos, many of which have been uploaded to iNaturalist (see their recently created projects for the two sites here and here). Notable records include two long-lost tree species known from three or fewer sites in the world; >40 species of aroids (think Philodendron) collected by Ecuadorean aroid specialist Gladys Benavides; and the wildflowers Gasteranthus macrocalyx and G. atratus, both of which are even rarer than G. extinctus. The G. extinctus work was part of a global project led by the Chicago Botanic Garden and funded by the Walder Foundation, for which Field Museum scientists received a subgrant to deliver live material to PJMBG without adversely affecting wild populations. The work was also supported by grants from the Mohamed bin Zayed Species Conservation Fund, UDLA, and the Winnetka Garden Club, and benefited from valuable institutional support from Ecuador’s National Biodiversity Institute, UDLA, Universidad Católica, Universidad San Francisco de Quito, and Selby. 

It’s our hope that those cultivated plants and their offspring will soon be telling their story of resilience and recovery to visitors of botanic gardens in Santo Domingo, Chicago, and around the world.

Chicago Botanic Garden scientists Kay Havens and Zoe Diaz-Martin, among other legends, have received an award from the Walder Foundation to study six Endangered species from around the Pacific Ocean with a focus on conservation genetics -- and they agreed that that G. extinctus should be one of those! So with the final goal of transplanting individuals from Centinela's forest remnants to the Botanic Garden in Santo Domingo, we are putting our networks together to create a stable ex-situ population of G. extinctus in order to ensure its survival, at least in captivity.

Xavier Cornejo has published  an insightful review on the botanical exploration, floristic studies, and  phytogeography of the coastal region of Ecuador in the Revista Científica Ciencias Naturales y Ambientales. His article documents our recent discoveries and the importance of our ongoing efforts at Centinela. Thank you for your expertise and tireless dedication to botanical research, Xavier Cornejo!
 

Congrats to Nicolás on his presentation titled, "BIODIVERSIDAD FLORÍSTICA Y CONSERVACIÓN EN REGIONES DEL OCCIDENTE ECUATORIANO", wherein he presented data and discussed the results from his many expeditions and collections, including into the Centinela region. Nicolás has now visited Centinela more than anyone else on our team.

• July 8, 2022 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRbjeqJ-67A

• April 2022 - Our paper on the rediscovery of Gasteranthus extinctus at Centinela was published in PhytoKeys.

November 13-16, 2021: The team wrapped up three days of fieldwork in the Centinela region and headed back to the herbaria in Quito and Guayaquil. Check out the Discoveries page to learn about the results of this effort.