• Help formalize protection of the Bosques y Cascadas Las Rocas (photo below), a spectacular privately owned forest fragment and ecotourism operation that has been seeking formal conservation status for years. A title dispute needs resolution.

• Learn more about the two large remaining forest fragments in the Centinela region and, in collaboration with local residents, identify realistic pathways for preserving them.

• Strengthen protection of the Cascadas de Cristal, a privately owned forest fragment and ecotourism operation.

• Advance the ex situ conservation of the locally endemic plant Gasteranthus extinctus in an accredited botanical garden, such as the Quito Botanical Garden.

• Help formalize protection of the Bosques y Cascadas Las Rocas, a spectacular privately owned forest fragment and ecotourism operation that has been seeking formal conservation status for years. A title dispute needs resolution.

• Update the map of primary forest fragments throughout the province of Santo Domingo de los Tsáchilas (photo below), and identify the highest priorities for conservation.

• Carry out biological inventories:

  • • of two large surviving fragments in the Centinela region (see Maps 2 and 3);

    • of the Bosques y Cascadas Las Rocas, a spectacular privately owned forest fragment and ecotourism operation just north of the Centinela region;

    • of the Cascadas de Cristal, a privately owned forest fragment and ecotourism operation just north of the Centinela region.

• Work with local residents in the vicinity of the remaining forest fragments to understand their history, land use, social organization, existing conservation practices, and knowledge of the landscape.

• Use new technologies to assess the extinction risk of threatened and endemic species in western Ecuador (e.g., population genomics, metabolomics, drone and satellite imagery).

• Quantify the population size and geographic distribution of Gasteranthus extinctus.

• Map primary forest fragments throughout the province of Santo Domingo de los Tsáchilas.

• Help identify plants recorded in the Centinela region in the iNaturalist Flora of Centinela project.

• Use iNaturalist EC to share natural history observations from the Centinela region. For a collection of plants recorded there to date, see the Flora of Centinela project.

Please consider a donation to these Ecuadorean conservation organizations working to conserve representative areas of coastal Ecuadorian forest:

• Fundación Great Leaf

• Fundación Ecominga

• Fundación Jatun Sacha

• Fundación Jocotoco

• Fundación JaPu

As well as their international partner organizations:

• Saving Nature

• Re:wild