The Chocó Lab: revealing the path to ecosystem restoration

Forest conservation is gaining importance, and there is an urgent need to recover natural forests, especially those from fragile or threatened ecosystems. At Fundación Jocotoco, we are conserving key biodiversity areas in Ecuador and we are mindful of this urgency. Canandé is Jocotoco’s largest reserve, with ~11,000 protected hectares in Ecuador’s Chocó lowland rainforest, which has been severely impacted due to the high deforestation rates. Less than 4% of the lowlands of Western Ecuador retain forest cover, so the hard work of Jocotoco is thus to not only protect the lowland rainforest but also to recover it and its stunning biodiversity.

Canandé protects unique species that occur nowhere else and others that rely on very large home ranges, such as the Jaguar and Great Green Macaw. Our camera traps recently recorded a giant anteater (less than a handful of records exist for Western Ecuador), and our park guards and external biologists continuously discover new species.?

Jocotoco rapidly expands Canandé Reserve to connect it with two national protected areas: Parque Nacional Cotacachi Cayapas and Refugio de Vida Silvestre El Pambilar. However, increasing the reserve’s area entails acquiring degraded areas and selectively logged forests, but in Jocotoco, we know that protecting the land is just the starting point. Our ultimate goal is to promote effective ecosystem restoration. When we started 22 years ago, we knew it would take time, but we did not know how little.??

Last year, we built the Chocó Lab, a new research station at Canandé Reserve that opened the doors of these protected lands to scientists to join forces and optimize conservation and restoration efforts in the future. The Chocó Lab is a fantastic place in the middle of the forest, equipped with a modern lab and a stunning view of the canopy of the Chocó rainforest, where you can see flocks of toucans passing by or gaze at the epiphytes growing on majestic tree trunks.

Here, the Reassembly research team, involving 14 universities (including several Ecuadorian ones), works under the leadership of the Technical University of Darmstadt from Germany. Through observations, experiments, and DNA barcoding, 12 Ph.D. students, with the help of local parabiologists are revealing the speed of rainforest recovery in our Canandé Reserve.?

Through a combination of camera traps, sound recording, DNA barcoding, and other methods, we are beginning to understand biodiversity recovery along a gradient of the forest recovery spanning 32 years. REASSEMBLY studies 62 plots within the reserve ranging from pastures, recovering secondary forests, and undisturbed areas. Along these levels of restoration, scientists set up experiments to compare plots and identify rules underlying the reassembly of species, populations, and communities.

At the Chocó Lab, distinct research groups are already creating an enormous impact on developing ideas to analyze the core ecological processes of the Chocó lowland rainforest, showing that recovering degraded ecosystems is more than planting native species of trees. If we can transform pastures into the forest, magic happens. It requires foresight and a bit of time, but less than you think.?

It is incredibly encouraging to see that it takes, on average, only 25 years for species to return to fallow land, once protected, in levels comparable to old-growth forests. In other words, researchers found that Jocotoco facilitates the recovery of the Chocó rainforest by protecting large swaths of intact rainforests. These areas promote the natural recolonization of adjacent abandoned pastures and cacao plantations within just one human generation.?

With the Chocó Lab, we demonstrate that forest recovery is tangible and that there are possibilities to bring back life, even in a rainforest, arguably one of the most complex ecosystems on earth. What it takes to restore hope is the foresighted action to protect Noah’s arks now to seed the return of life within 2-3 decades.?

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