Floreana: A model island for holistic restoration

In my career as a tropical restoration ecologist, where I have focused my research mostly in Central America, I had not seen this kind of ambition and scale before. It was exciting and daunting – eradication of invasive species on a large island (~170 km2), alongside the reintroduction of a number of iconic native species that were no longer present – from giant tortoises to the endemic Floreana mockingbird.

At the time, the project was being led by the Galapagos National Park Directorate and the Galapagos Biosecurity Agency, as well as Island Conservation, Fundación de Conservación Jocotoco and Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust, with many others involved, including both GCT and CDF. But for all the awe at the sheer ambition and complexity of the project, over the intervening months and years, I began to feel that there was a missing piece in this puzzle.

The focus was very much on reestablishing the faunal balance of the island to its historic past, but what about the flora – or, from a more animal-centric perspective, what about the habitat that needs to be restored to support the native fauna we are trying to bring back! That ingredient was seemingly not a major priority – at least not then.

Fast forward to 2025, and the first major eradication effort has taken place (in the last quarter of 2023), resulting in the near total elimination of invasives. The results from this first eradication attempt have nonetheless been stunning – from the (re)discovery of the Galapagos rail, not censused on the island since the time of Charles Darwin almost 200 years ago, to a rapid increase in nesting blue-footed boobies, to bountiful harvests in the agricultural zone with no damage from pesky little mice.

The rebalance of the fauna is well underway, and in the coming months and years, once rodents are fully removed from the island, planned reintroductions will take place. But what is still missing is the habitat.

By now, you should have surmised that I am a plant person – and that is the correct reading! I have worked my whole career as a plant restoration ecologist, specifically focused on the restoration of tropical forests. And what I saw in Floreana was an enormous opportunity… one where CDF could play a pivotal role in one of the most ambitious restoration projects in the world. As such, after the eradication phase was completed, I engaged with key leaders of the project to press the case, and in early 2025, we were added to the Floreana restoration project as a co-executor, specifically to help with the restoration of native habitat on the island alongside the other initiatives that we are already leading there.

There are an estimated 1,100 hectares of degraded habitat in Floreana – this is habitat that has been overrun by non-native invasive species. So we are talking about a big area – a massive landscape-level effort to restore the plant community to something more similar to what it looked like before all of the introduced species ran roughshod over the island. But what is particularly challenging here is that this cannot happen overnight.

Habitat restoration takes time and repeated interventions. As such, we need to approach this challenge from a long-term perspective and an understanding that it will likely take us 20 years or more to get to where we want to be. And perhaps that is why habitat restoration has not been tackled – it is labour- and time-intensive, and progress is more incremental than it is striking. But it is a critical part of holistic ecosystem restoration, and once completed, it will be transformative.

So why is habitat restoration so important? What if we just removed the feral cats and rodents that have clear, tangible negative impacts on native fauna, reintroduced the missing faunal species and left the rest to nature, as it were? You would get some successful responses for sure. But success would likely be less than its full potential, and it would be limited by the lack of habitat for these reintroduced species.

It is actually quite hard to ascertain what specific threat in the environment leads to the breakdown of functioning or the loss of a particular species. But what is very well demonstrated is that in ecology, everything is interconnected, and ecosystems are made up of a complex web of interactions. Manipulating any of the threads that make up this web has impacts downwind – some more so than others. So when you restore an area, you are essentially trying to bring back this web of complexity. And what is also clear is that habitat is the platform upon which species coexist and thrive, and if it is degraded or entirely lost, the species that can inhabit it will be different.

While the eradication of invasive species such as rodents is a critical step and addresses a clear driver of the decline of many species, it is just one piece of the restoration puzzle. To successfully bring back native species that once thrived on Floreana (or anywhere for that matter), you need native habitat, and in its absence (or degraded state), that means you have to restore it. That is the challenge before us today in Floreana – restore the ~1,100 hectares of degraded habitat on the island such that the reintroduction of species that were once present on the island not only succeeds but thrives!

As co-executor, CDF will lead this long-term initiative, and to do so, we will need to raise a significant amount of funding. But with our long-standing support from GCT, alongside our many direct supporters, we will do just that and transform Floreana into an exemplar model for holistic island restoration that we can then replicate elsewhere in Galapagos, and beyond.