Ecuadorian plant tissue culture laboratory; GHRI’s partner for the Scalesia in vitro protocol.
Sylvan Bio Inc. is the source of Pleurotus ostreatus strain SPX-281 — a patented, sporeless cultivar selected for its biosafety profile in sensitive island ecosystems and suitability for the Galápagos’ phytosanitary approval framework.
Nofence AS (Norway) makes GPS virtual-fencing collars for livestock. Under a letter of intent signed in September 2026 it supports GHRI’s virtual-fencing pilot on Santa Cruz; the first C2.5 collar was handed over in Madrid in October 2026.
Restoring what the islands were
Founded by Marcelo Chávez García, MD, PhD
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 an estimated 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.
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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 millennia.
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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.
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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.
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06 / PREVENTING RELAPSE
Cutting is the “easy half”. Everything above answers removal — and conventional practice answers the rest with herbicide in the first months, then manual passes, for years. Directed cattle grazing is the alternative we are testing.
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07 / 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.
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08 / ENCLOSURE
The same herd the trial puts on the blackberry regrowth would browse the replacement. The trial will test two ways to stop it, and adopt whichever works better.
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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.
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About 75 per cent of the islands’ agricultural food supply comes from the mainland, and every cargo can carry the next invader. That steady supply discourages local farming, and where farms are abandoned, invasive plants spread fast: the land that could feed the islands is lost to the invaders already here.
Two loops through the same highland farmland. The loop that endangers: farmland taken by invaders, so less food is grown on the islands, so more food is shipped in (75% of the agricultural food supply in 2017, 95% projected for 2037), and new species arrive with it (1,579 recorded so far), which spread into the farmland. The loop we are building: remove the invader, restore native plants, valorize the biomass as feed, food and materials, so that more is made on the islands and less is shipped in.
Most removal stops when the money stops, because it produces nothing. This one is built so that what is pulled out becomes material with a market wherever it safely can, and a fixed share of what it earns funds the next hectare.
75% → 95%
of the islands’ agricultural food supply came from the mainland in 2017. With no change in food policy, the model projects 95% by 2037.
Sampedro et al. 2020 · Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems
1,579
alien species introduced to Galápagos by people, 1,476 of them established. Just over half arrived by accident: most on plants and plant material, then on planes and boats, and on goods, especially fruit and vegetables.
Toral-Granda et al. 2017 · PLoS ONE
94% → 7%
native vegetation outside the National Park on Santa Cruz. By 2018, 67% of that land was farmland and 26% invasive species, and where farms were abandoned the invaders spread fast.
Alomía Herrera et al. 2022 · Land
5.9% · 33.7%
mean cover of invasive guava on farms in Santa Cruz and San Cristóbal, by the owner’s main income. Worked farms carry far less of the invader.
Acosta-Vásconez et al. 2025 · Biological Invasions
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
Scalesia, the tree daisies often called the “Darwin’s finches of the plant world”, once formed the cloud forest of the Galápagos highlands. On Santa Cruz only 1–3% of that forest remains, as published. Invasive blackberry is displacing what is left, and about 95% of Scalesia pedunculata seedlings die in the field.
No in vitro propagation protocol has ever been published for any Scalesia species. The only previous attempt, by the Galápagos National Park in 2006, stopped at establishment. GHRI is developing the first.
We start with a training set (Psidium galapageium as a feasibility control, then S. pedunculata and S. affinis) so the method exists before it is needed for the rarest species, such as S. retroflexa, whose seed viability is under 7%. Tissue culture lets us capture and bank specific genotypes, which seed cannot do in a genus whose islands hold genetically distinct populations.
Our commitments: nursery-grown plants only, no wild collection; no genetic modification; the finished protocol goes to the Galápagos National Park free of charge and will be published, negative results included. During the protocol phase, material moves one way and nothing living returns to the islands; plants for the highlands will be produced in Galápagos once the protocol exists and is authorised.
Bench work is carried out with Invitrolab, our partner laboratory in Quito. Authorisation under Ecuador’s 2026 research regulation is in progress with the Galápagos National Park Directorate.
Sources: Walentowitz et al. 2021, PLOS ONE 16:e0258467 (seedling mortality) · Riegl et al. 2023, Ecological Applications 33(4):e2846 (blackberry displacement) · Izquierdo 2006, Lyonia 9(2):57–62 (the 2006 attempt) · Jaramillo Díaz, Calle-Loor & Sevilla 2025, Oryx 59(4):411–417 (S. retroflexa seed viability)
Clearing blackberry is the easy half; holding the ground is the hard one. We are testing whether cattle held by GPS collars inside virtual boundaries, and put onto cleared ground when the soft regrowth appears, can keep it from re-establishing, on Santa Cruz farmland used by Critically Endangered giant tortoises. It is a question, not a result: the one controlled cattle trial on a blackberry we know of, in Florida, found the cattle avoided it.
Mycelium-based materials, Brussels, October 2026: the kind of use the research would test with native strains.
The Galápagos funga is poorly documented. We propose to find out which fungi already live in the Santa Cruz highlands, and whether local strains could turn invasive woody biomass into useful materials without bringing a single new organism to the islands. That is a hypothesis: no strain has been tested for it.
In October 2026 we presented the proposal to the Research Group of Microbiology at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), and funding is being sought. Any commercial application would be carried out by Galápagos Bio-Valorización, a separate company owned by GHRI’s founder.
GHRI works with specialist partners whose technology and expertise shape our protocols directly. Each description is drawn from the partner’s own published work or written commitments. We do not name a collaborator before they have agreed to be named.
Plant tissue culture laboratory in Quito; GHRI’s partner for the Scalesia in vitro protocol. Agreement reached April 2026; collaboration documents signed.
Visit invitrolab.lat ↗The Conservatoire botanique national de Brest (France) advises GHRI’s Scalesia programme on protocol design, acclimatisation and long-term maintenance of clonal lines. In 1993 Brest achieved a world first in conservation: it regenerated Cylindrocline lorencei, a Mauritian plant already extinct in the wild, from seeds that could no longer germinate, and it is now returning the species to Mauritius after invasive guava was cleared from its habitat. It is the same sequence GHRI follows in Galápagos: remove the invader, restore the habitat, then reintroduce.
Visit cbnbrest.fr ↗
Nofence AS (Norway) develops and supplies virtual fencing systems for livestock: GPS-enabled collars and a mobile application keep animals inside boundaries drawn on a map, without physical fences. In a letter of intent signed in September 2026, Nofence stated it is prepared to supply collars for GHRI’s virtual-fencing pilot on Santa Cruz, on commercial terms, once the project secures funding and authorisation, and to provide technical guidance. The first test collar was handed over in Madrid in October 2026.
Visit nofence.no ↗
Sylvan Bio Inc. is the source of Pleurotus ostreatus strain SPX-281 — a patented, sporeless cultivar selected for its biosafety profile in sensitive island ecosystems and suitability for the Galápagos’ phytosanitary approval framework.
Visit sylvan.bio ↗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. GHRI is being constituted as a Fundación under Ecuadorian law (name reserved by the Ministry of Environment and Energy, 24 September 2026; legal personality expected November 2026). We would rather tell you that than let you find it.
GHRI works with local communities, landowners and conservation authorities, and will publish 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 much 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
