Restoring what the islands were
Galápagos Habitat Restoration Institute
Santa Cruz · Galápagos · Ecuador
A Galápagos nonprofit clearing invasive species from the highlands and rebuilding the endemic cloud forest — and making the biomass it removes worth something to the people who live here.
Rubus niveus — hill blackberry · invasive
While the world watches the marine reserve, the highlands are being quietly smothered — the endemic Scalesia forest replaced by a wall of thorns.
Rubus niveus — hill blackberry, introduced in 1968 — now stands across more than 30,000 hectares of highland (see what that looks like →) in thickets four metres high. What it replaces is a forest that exists nowhere else: Scalesia pedunculata, a daisy that became a tree. Our seal is a Scalesia leaf. It is not decoration — it is the thing we are trying to put back.
Where blackberry stands, Scalesia does not regenerate at all. Not slowly — not at all: mature trees die and nothing replaces them, and on the present trajectory the species could reach quasi-extinction within about twenty years (Riegl et al., 2023). Removal works. It only works if it is sustained.1
The forest is not the only casualty. The Western Santa Cruz Giant Tortoise, Chelonoidis porteri, is Critically Endangered — around 3,400 animals remain2. Every year they migrate between highland nesting grounds and the arid lowlands, a route their ancestors have walked for millennia. Blackberry now walls those corridors and degrades the nesting ground at the end of them. An animal that has crossed these islands since before human memory finds its oldest paths closed.
Guava, quinine tree and Lantana compound the damage. Over 870 introduced plant species now stand against fewer than 600 natives — many already threatened. This is the problem GHRI was created to address.
Hectares mean nothing until you stand them next to something you know. So we did.
Currently, only 1% of the original Scalesia forest remains. This surviving area represents merely a fraction of the forest’s historical extent, which originally covered approximately 10% of the island.
Source: Charles Darwin Foundation
What is the extent of the invasion?
The same 30,000 hectares can be seen a different way — relative infestation pressure by elevation zone and island.
That is 5.1× the size of Manhattan.
Each outline below is one Manhattan. Red is invaded ground.
Blackberry is only the fastest invader — guava already covers more ground. Switch the others on to see the real footprint.
| Species | Extent | Since & impact |
|---|---|---|
| BlackberryRubus niveus | 30,000 ha | Since 1968 · archipelago-wide Impact 5/5 — transformer |
| GuavaPsidium guajava | 40,000+ ha | Since the late 1800s · Isabela Impact 4/5 — monodominant forest |
| Quinine treeCinchona pubescens | 11,000+ ha | Since 1946 · Santa Cruz Impact 5/5 — ecosystem engineer |
5.1× the invaded area equals Manhattan · one outline = 59 km²
Isabela · volcanic highlands
03 / WHY RUBUS
By forming impenetrable thickets, Rubus both displaces native wildlife from their natural habitat and physically blocks their nesting sites and vital migration routes — journeys they have made for millions of years.
04 / HOW IT IS CONTROLLED NOW
The documented conventional regime on Santa Cruz: cut, then three foliar herbicide passes, then a widening interval that never closes. This is containment, not removal — and it is the baseline every other approach is measured against.
05 / THE PROPOSED SOLUTION
We propose a combination of what would appear to be unrelated technologies — and we bring them together to restore the Galápagos ecosystem.
06 / PREVENTING RELAPSE
Cutting is the “easy half”. Everything above answers removal — and conventional practice answers the rest with herbicide, three passes a year, for years. The cattle are the alternative.
Missed how it is controlled today? ← go back07 / RESTORATION
Removal is answered, and so is relapse. This is the half that has to hold on its own once we stop coming — endemics multiplied, planted, protected, then released.
08 / ENCLOSURE
The same herd that clears the blackberry would browse the replacement. We are testing two ways to stop it, and adopting whichever works better.
09 / THE OUTCOME
Cattle are withdrawn, and the plot is expected to hold itself as the canopy closes. This is the step with the least evidence behind it, and the one every step before it is for.
Most eradication fails because it produces nothing. This one is built so that every kilogram pulled out becomes a material with a market — and a fixed share of what that material earns funds the next hectare.
Almost every conservation organization exists to prevent one. We exist to cause one — locally and deliberately — to a species that should never have arrived. Turning invasive biomass into products that sell is how we intend to fund what fifty years of intermittent clearing could not: removal that does not stop when a grant cycle ends.
The obvious objection came from a government minister during a meeting: if you create a market for blackberries, won't someone intentionally grow them?
Our safeguard against this is simple: nobody is paid by weight for material they bring in.
GHRI handles the extraction directly. We clear mapped, geolocated parcels, verify the eradication, and pass the material on under a chain-of-custody record — tracked from the GPS coordinates of its removal through to the finished object. There is no open market to sell into and no bounty to collect, so there is no financial reason for anyone to cultivate the invader — which is in any case prohibited outright under the biosecurity framework. We are building these controls now, while the volumes are trivial, rather than discovering later that we need them.
GHRI’s first operations are on private farmland in the Santa Cruz highlands, with the families who ranch it. That is deliberate: much of the blackberry grows there, it needs no protected-area permit, and it lets us prove the method before proposing it inside the National Park.
Rubus is where the cutting starts, and the resin pieces made from it are the first thing this model has produced. The revenue is small. That is also the point — it pays for the step after it.
That step is Leucaena leucocephala, in the transition belt above Puerto Ayora. The trees are large, and taking them down cost money we did not have until the first pieces sold.
Leucaena is aggressive and allelopathic. Elsewhere in the tropics it is valued cattle fodder, but only where the animals carry the rumen bacterium that breaks down its toxin — and ranchers here describe the opposite: cattle driven onto it in the dry season lose hair and lose weight. So for now it goes into durable objects rather than feed, each piece carrying the GPS coordinates of the tree it came from.
Every removal is photographed, filmed and geolocated. No quantified estimate of Leucaena’s extent in Galápagos exists — nobody has measured how much ground it holds — so our removal records are the beginning of the first quantitative dataset on this invasion.
Removal zones are chosen by field survey and ecological mapping, with the Dirección del Parque Nacional Galápagos. Every site is documented — area cleared, biomass recovered, native response — so the method can be audited and repeated rather than merely asserted.
Removed biomass goes to productive use rather than a burn pile. The routes below are at different stages and we are honest about which is where. The principle is constant: restoration that generates local value is restoration a community has reason to continue.
Bellavista — the farmed boundary where removal begins
Santa Cruz · lava-rock lagoon
Today's field work is the foundation. As capacity grows, GHRI is opening two further lines of intervention — each one turning the invader into something the islands need.
GHRI works with specialist partners whose technology and expertise shape our protocols directly. Every organization listed here has reviewed and approved its own description. We do not name a collaborator before they have agreed to be named.
Development of in vitro propagation protocols for Scalesia pedunculata and other priority endemic species, for direct field reintroduction. No protocol has been published for any species of Scalesia; this work aims to produce the first. Agreement reached April 2026. and other priority endemic species from single explants for direct field reintroduction.
Visit invitrolab.lat ↗Institutional coordination
GHRI's work is coordinated with the Galápagos institutions responsible for the land and the biosecurity framework it operates under. Coordination is not endorsement, and we list it as what it is.
Puerto Ayora · research station area
The Galápagos Habitat Restoration Institute is a Galápagos-based nonprofit working on invasive species removal and endemic ecosystem restoration on Santa Cruz. Incorporation as an Ecuadorian Fundación is in progress and expected to complete in late 2026. We would rather tell you that than let you find it.
GHRI works with local communities, landowners and conservation authorities, and publishes the results of its field and research programmes.
How the work is funded. We remove what damages this ecosystem whether or not it pays. Value is not what decides where we cut — it is what pays for cutting again next year. The full funding structure, the related-party position and the revenue commitment are set out on the governance page.
My family settled in Santa Cruz in the early 1980s. I spent my childhood exploring the highlands — the Scalesia cloud forests, the paths the giant tortoises follow between their nesting grounds and the lowlands, the volcanic soil that felt like it could grow anything. Those forests were the ordinary world of my childhood, and I assumed they were permanent.
They were not. I graduated as an M.D. from the Central University in Quito, took a PhD in biomedical sciences at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, and in 2016 joined Stanford as a research scientist at the Baxter Laboratory for Stem Cell Biology. My work has been built on precision — mass spectrometry, proteomics, signalling pathways, the molecular mechanisms of disease: taking a system apart and finding the step that fails.
On visits home I watched the highlands change. The forests I remembered were being consumed by something I can only describe as an infiltrating tumour: Rubus niveus in dense, impenetrable thickets, smothering the endemic Scalesia and closing the corridors the tortoises have walked for millennia. My first instinct was not botanical; it was medical. And the response I found was a cycle of clearing that stopped whenever the money did.
The turning point came from a hobby growing mushrooms at home. Fungi secrete enzymes that break down lignin, the exact woody polymer making up the invasive blackberry. I realized we could feed the thing destroying the Galápagos to an organism that turns it into food.
After two decades building a career on evidence, I came home convinced that the same rigour can — and must — be applied here. It comes from one conviction: conservation that asks a community to sacrifice is abandoned the moment the funding stops. We are galapagueños; my family has been part of this place for more than forty years, and we are not transient visitors to this problem. We need to build our livelihoods by keeping these islands intact — make that work, and the work continues without us. We will not pass this on unsolved.
GHRI is my answer.
EMBO Long-Term Fellowship
European Molecular Biology Organization
Pew Latin American Fellows Award
Pew Charitable Trusts
Cabeaux-Jacobs Award
Belgian American Educational Foundation
Santa Cruz · undeveloped coast
The highlands are not a field site GHRI visits. They are where our field lead has lived and worked all his adult life.
Fredy García
Field Operations Lead
Bellavista · Santa Cruz highlands
Fredy has worked the Santa Cruz highlands all his adult life, in cattle and on the land. He knows where Rubus niveus is thickest, which properties it has taken, and which gates open — knowledge no survey substitutes for and no visitor acquires.
He leads GHRI's field operations: removal logistics, site access, and day-to-day coordination with the ranching families whose land the invasion crosses. His standing with local ranchers, the Dirección del Parque Nacional Galápagos and the GAD Municipal de Santa Cruz is the reason this work can reach private land — where most of the blackberry actually grows.
He also farms. On the family smallholding in Bellavista they raise poultry and grow plátano and yuca to replace feed corn shipped from the mainland — every sack of which is a possible route for disease into a population of endemic birds. It is GHRI's argument at landscape scale, worked out on one farm.
Short, dated, unedited. If a month is quiet, it says so.
GHRI welcomes communication from grant-making organizations, conservation researchers, academic institutions, and community partners — for research collaboration, funding, and institutional inquiries.
info@galapagoshri.org
