Galápagos Habitat Restoration Institute

01 / ThreatRubus niveus

A silent emergency

A hill blackberry plant growing at the edge of pasture in the Santa Cruz highlands

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.

The Galápagos are among the most ecologically unique places on Earth, and among the most vulnerable. Rubus niveus — the hill blackberry, introduced in 1968 — has spread across more than 30,000 hectares of highland terrain (see what that actually looks like →), forming thickets four metres high: dense enough to shut out light, stop native seedlings germinating, and raise a wall that large animals cannot cross.

What it displaces is a forest that exists nowhere else. Scalesia pedunculata is a daisy that became a tree. In the isolation of these islands, a family that elsewhere makes sunflowers and asters grew a trunk and a canopy and closed over the highlands as forest. Our seal is a Scalesia leaf. It is not decoration. It is the thing we are trying to put back.

And losing it does not mean losing a tree. It means losing the roof. Endemic invertebrates, Darwin's finches, entire communities of epiphytes live in the structure that Scalesia builds — they do not merely coexist with it, they depend on its architecture. When the canopy goes, an ecosystem goes with it, species by species, most of them unnamed in any headline. On Santa Cruz, about one per cent of that forest remains.1

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). The same research carries the one piece of good news in this section. Where the blackberry was cleared, seedlings returned and adult mortality fell — from 16.2 per cent a year to 12.5 per cent. Removal works. It only works if it is sustained. 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). The same research carries the one piece of good news in this section. Where the blackberry was cleared, seedlings returned and adult mortality fell. Removal works. It only works if it is sustained.

The forest is not the only casualty. The Western Santa Cruz Giant Tortoise, Chelonoidis porteri, is Critically Endangered — an estimated 3,400 animals remain3. 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.

Sources for this section

Rentería, J. L. et al. (2012). Management of the invasive hill raspberry (Rubus niveus). PLOS ONE — introduction date, extent, and ~1% of Scalesia remaining (citing Mauchamp & Atkinson). ↩
Riegl, B., Walentowitz, A., Sevilla, C., Chango, R. & Jäger, H. (2023). Invasive blackberry outcompetes the endemic Galapagos tree daisy Scalesia pedunculata. Ecological Applications 33(4): e2846. doi:10.1002/eap.2846 ↩. Ecological Applications. ↩
IUCN Red List — Western Santa Cruz Giant Tortoise (Chelonoidis porteri), Critically Endangered; population estimated at 3,400 (Cayot et al., 2017). ↩), Critically Endangered. ↩

02 / Scalehow big is 30,000 hectares?

A number no one
can picture

Hectares mean nothing until you stand them next to something you know. So we did.

The same 30,000 hectares can be seen a different way — relative infestation pressure by elevation zone and island.

Want to learn more? Explore the elevation map →

Where it has been recorded →

30,000ha ≈ 300 km² · 116 sq mi
1 species · of 870 introduced plants on record

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.

View the figures as a table

Invasive species on record — extent and impact
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

Compare to

5.1× the invaded area equals Manhattan · one outline = 59 km²

2,300 yrs

to clear it at today's pace
~13 hectares treated per year

2,300 years →

03 / Methoda closed loop

Remove. Restore.
Valorize.

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.

Two organizations, one loop. GHRI removes the invaders and restores the ground. A separate company, Galápagos Bio-Valorización, turns the removed biomass into products and returns a fixed share of its revenue to the restoration work. What binds them is a written agreement, not a good intention. That is the whole thesis, and everything below is built to test it.

Phase 01 — Remove

Pull the invader out

Manual removal in targeted highland zones, mapped with the National Park Directorate. We take out the most damaging species while minimizing soil disturbance — because bare ground invites re-invasion.

Phase 02 — Restore

Give the forest room

Every kilogram removed opens space for native seedlings. We track restoration progress and monitor re-colonization by endemic species across each treated site.

Phase 03 — Valorize

Turn waste into value

The invader is not waste. Blackberry cane is lignin, cellulose and fibre — the same raw material that feeds mushrooms, presses into board, burns as fuel and turns into soil. Galápagos Bio-Valorización is building more than one outlet, deliberately, so that no single permit or market decides whether the loop closes.

↻ revenue funds Phase 01

We are trying to cause
an extinction

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?

It is the right question. Historically, bounty schemes have created the very supply they meant to destroy.

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 to Galápagos Bio-Valorización under a chain-of-custody record. There is no open market to sell into, no bounty to collect, and therefore no financial reason for anyone to cultivate the invader. Cultivating a declared invasive species in the Galápagos is in any case strictly prohibited under the biosecurity framework.

There is only one version of this risk we take seriously. While raw bulk feedstock is worth pennies, a handmade artisanal object sells for far more than the wood inside it. It is there, at the high-value end of production, that a perverse incentive could eventually bite.

That is why provenance controls are enforced from the start — material is tracked from the exact GPS coordinates of its removal through to the final product. We are building these safeguards now, while the volumes are trivial, rather than waiting to discover we need them.

04 / FieldSanta Cruz highlands

Working in the field

GHRI's first operations are in the highlands of Santa Cruz, on private agricultural land, in coordination with the ranching families who farm it. Starting on farmland is a deliberate choice: it is where a great deal of the blackberry actually grows, it needs no protected-area permit, and it lets us prove the method before proposing it anywhere inside the National Park.

What is running now

Small-scale Rubus niveus extraction is under way on private land in the Santa Cruz highlands, supplying material for resin and preservation trials. The volumes are trial volumes — meaningful as method, not yet as ecology, and we would rather say so than round up. It is where the protocols get written: how cane is cut, handled, dried, recorded. Blackberry and guava are as much a problem on the highland farms as inside the Park, and farmland is where this work can begin without waiting for anyone's permission. extraction is under way on private land in the Santa Cruz highlands, supplying material for resin and preservation trials. The volumes are trial volumes — meaningful as method, not yet as ecology, and we would rather say so than round up. It is where the protocols get written: how cane is cut, handled, dried, recorded. Blackberry and guava are as much a problem on the highland farms as inside the Park, and farmland is where this work can begin without waiting for anyone's permission.

First target

Where we start

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. grows in the transition belt above Puerto Ayora. We chose it as our starting point for restoration and biovalorization because it sits on land requiring only municipal permits — meaning we can act immediately and test our extraction methods while longer regulatory processes run elsewhere.

That step is Leucaena leucocephala, which grows in the transition belt above Puerto Ayora. The trees are large and taking them down costs money we did not have until the first pieces sold. The land needs only municipal permits, so the work can proceed immediately while longer regulatory processes run elsewhere.

Leucaena is a highly aggressive invader, and allelopathic — it suppresses the native plants around it. Elsewhere in the tropics it is also a valued cattle fodder, but only where the animals carry Synergistes jonesii, the rumen bacterium that breaks down its toxin, mimosine. Ranchers here describe the opposite. Cattle driven onto Leucaena in the dry season, when nothing else is left, lose hair and lose weight. That is the textbook signature of mimosine and its breakdown product accumulating in an animal with no defence against them, and it suggests the bacterium is absent from Galápagos herds. Introducing it would be a biological import, with its own risk analysis — a question for another year. For now, Leucaena biomass here goes into durable objects rather than into feed: crafted wood goods and seeds set in resin. Every finished piece carries the exact GPS coordinates of the tree it came from.

Every removal is photographed, filmed, and geolocated. This matters because no quantified estimate of Leucaena's extent in Galápagos exists — the Charles Darwin Foundation's species record describes its distribution and impact, but no one has measured how much ground it holds. Our published removal records are not just proof of work; they are the beginning of the first quantitative dataset on this invasion.. We prioritize the most aggressive species, and every site is documented — area cleared, biomass recovered, native response — so that the method can be audited and repeated rather than merely asserted.

Removal Rubus · Psidium · Cinchona

Removal zones are identified through field survey and ecological mapping, in coordination with the Dirección del Parque Nacional Galápagos. We prioritize the most aggressive species, and every site is documented — area cleared, biomass recovered, native response — so that the method can be audited and repeated rather than merely asserted.. We prioritize the most aggressive species and document removal area, biomass yield, and native response at every site.

Valorization

Removed biomass goes to productive use rather than to a burn pile. The routes below are developed and operated by Galápagos Bio-Valorización; they 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.

Awaiting a regulatory framework

Fungal bioconversion

Blackberry cane, chipped and sterilized, is a near-ideal substrate for oyster mushrooms (Pleurotus ostreatus). Their enzymes dismantle lignin — the woody armour that makes the plant impossible to compost and impossible for cattle to digest. The mushrooms are food. What remains after harvest, with its lignin already broken, ferments into drought-season livestock feed.). Their enzymes dismantle lignin — the woody armour that makes the plant impossible to compost and impossible for cattle to digest. The mushrooms are food. What remains after harvest, with its lignin already broken, ferments into drought-season livestock feed. A Pest Risk Analysis for the sporeless strain we have selected was submitted to the Galápagos Biosecurity Agency in October 2025 and remains in technical review. Nothing will be imported or inoculated until that authorization is granted.

This route waits on a regulatory framework that does not yet exist. The process was opened with the Galápagos Biosecurity Agency in October 2025 and a Pest Risk Analysis for the sporeless strain was filed in May 2026. In June 2026 the Agency confirmed that no import procedure for edible fungi currently exists, and that a normative framework has to be created before a risk analysis of this kind can be concluded (Oficio ABG-DVCB-2026-0319-O). The Agency has not put a date on it. We plan on the assumption that it runs into 2027, and we have built everything else so that none of it waits on this file. Nothing will be imported or inoculated until authorization is granted.

In development

Pulp and paperboard

Blackberry fibre can be pulped. Board and paper made from it require no biological import and therefore no pathogen assessment — which makes this one of the routes that can move while the regulatory file is open. The islands import their packaging; there is no reason the packaging could not be made from what is cut out of the highlands.

In development

Wood and craft

Invasive hardwood, and the paper nests of invasive wasps, become objects: bookmarks, small goods, things a visitor can carry home. It is the smallest of these routes by volume and possibly the most useful by argument — a visitor holding a bookmark made from an invasive wasp nest has understood the model in about four seconds.

In development

Biochar and soil

Woody material that cannot be safely composted is pyrolyzed into biochar. Galápagos volcanic soils are porous and low in organic matter, and take biochar amendment well — carbon held in the ground, moisture held in the root zone. The invader becomes medicine for the soil it damaged.

In discussion · pilots planned

Managed grazing

Not every invader is woody, and not every stage of one is. Mature blackberry is lignified cane that no animal will touch — but the regrowth that follows cutting is soft, green and entirely edible. That is the opening. Held inside GPS boundaries by solar-powered virtual-fencing collars, cattle can be directed onto cleared ground precisely when the regrowth appears, suppressing the relapse that otherwise undoes the work — a follow-up crew that costs no wages and is grazing pasture the rancher wanted grazed anyway. We are in discussion with a European virtual-fencing manufacturer and are planning first pilots on private farmland, where no protected-area permit is required and the method can be measured before it is proposed anywhere else.

Long-term vision

Biomass energy

At full scale, residual invasive biomass becomes electricity — powering the archipelago with the very organisms that threaten it. Every kilogram burned is a kilogram permanently gone.

The Galápagos import nearly all their liquid fuel by ship, through a marine reserve. Biomass energy would cut that dependency while creating a permanent economic reason to keep clearing.

A wire fence line dividing pasture in the Bellavista agricultural belt, Santa Cruz

Bellavista — the farmed boundary where removal begins

04b / Frontierin development

Toward a complete
restoration science

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.

In development

Depleting the seed bank

Cutting the standing plant is the visible half of the problem. The invisible half is underground, and the working estimate — that blackberry seed stays viable for over ten years — is an estimate, not a measurement. Poultry, managed in controlled runs over cleared plots, are efficient seed predators. It is a cheap intervention, it is testable against untreated controls, and it would give a number where there is currently an assumption. We intend to run it as a trial, and to publish the result whichever way it falls.

In development

In vitro reforestation

Cleared ground left bare is recolonized by whatever arrives first. Our answer is to replant it immediately with the species the blackberry displaced, and to raise those plants by micropropagation rather than from seed.

There is a problem first: no in vitro propagation protocol has been published for any species of Scalesia. Developing one would be the first for the genus, and that is the work we are starting. Seed propagation of Scalesia pedunculata is slow and genetically narrow. From a handful of explants, tissue culture can raise thousands of saplings, drawn from many parent trees, preserving a breadth of genetic diversity that collecting from a few surviving stands never could. And it offers something a nursery cannot: cultures can be cryogenically banked — a living tissue archive, the botanical counterpart of a seed vault — and revived years later. For a tree already reduced to a fraction of its range, that is real insurance. A fire, or a severe El Niño taking the last wild stands, would not have to mean the species was lost.

04c / Food

The islands import the
next invasion

There is a loop at the centre of life in the Galápagos, and it is the reason this project is about food as much as forest.

Roughly 75 per cent of the archipelago's agricultural food supply comes by ship from mainland Ecuador — a share modelled to reach 95 per cent by 20371 if nothing changes. Part of the reason the islands cannot simply grow their own is that there is so little room: about 97 per cent of the archipelago is protected national park, and what is left for agriculture is limited and already under strain.

But the deeper problem is what the ships carry. Maritime cargo is the single largest pathway by which new invasive species arrive. Every vessel that docks with food also docks with risk. The system that feeds the islands is the system that endangers them — a loop in which the act of eating imports the next invasion.

↻ The loop that endangers

Food imported by ship→cargo carries new invasives→highlands degrade→less grown locally↺more imported

↻ The loop we are building

Invasive biomass removed→becomes local food & feed→less imported→fewer new arrivals↺less to remove

And the pressure runs both ways. El Niño brings rain that accelerates the blackberry and warm water that collapses the fisheries; the La Niña drought that follows withers the pastures and forces still heavier reliance on imported feed — at the same moment that flooding on the coast disrupts the mainland end of the supply chain. A food system anchored six hundred miles away is exposed at both ends of the cycle. One that can turn local biomass into food and feed is not.

There is a finding in the literature that ought to be better known: abandoned farmland is invaded faster than farmland that is worked.2 Which means the livelihood question and the conservation question in the Galápagos are not two questions. They are one question, and it has only ever had one answer.

Sources for this section

Sampedro, C. et al. (2020). Food import dependency in Galápagos. Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems — ~75% of agricultural food supply imported, projected to ~95% by 2037, and maritime cargo as the principal invasion pathway. ↩
Khatun, K. (2018). Land abandonment and biological invasion. — abandoned farmland is invaded faster than farmland that is worked. ↩

05 / Collaboration

Technical
collaboration

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.

Invitrolab

Plant tissue culture

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.

Dirección del Parque Nacional Galápagos — regulatory authority for protected areas; briefed on the project.
Agencia de Bioseguridad para Galápagos — biosecurity regulator; process opened October 2025, Pest Risk Analysis filed May 2026, awaiting the normative framework the Agency confirmed in June 2026 must be developed first (Oficio ABG-DVCB-2026-0319-O). See Governance & transparency for the full sequence. — biosecurity regulator; Pest Risk Analysis submitted October 2025 and in technical review.
Ministerio de Agricultura y Ganadería — briefed on the project. — briefed on the project; interested in spent-substrate silage as drought-resilient forage for the local livestock sector.

06 / Institute

Built on science,
rooted in the islands

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 in coordination with local communities, landowners, and conservation authorities, and is committed to transparency and to publishing the results of its field and research programs.

How the work is funded. We remove what damages this ecosystem whether or not it pays. Value is not what decides which plants come out — it is what decides whether the removal is still happening in ten years. Some biomass will find a market quickly; some will find one later; some never will, and that clearing is simply subsidized by the rest. We remove what damages this ecosystem whether or not it pays. Value is not what decides which plants come out — it is what decides whether the removal is still happening in ten years. Some biomass will find a market quickly; some will find one later; some never will, and that clearing is simply subsidized by the rest. As the product lines mature they will be operated commercially and separately from the Institute, and GHRI intends to bind a fixed share of that revenue — gross, not profit — to restoration work, through a written instrument published on this page once executed. We are stating the intention now, while there is no money to argue about, because that is the only moment at which such a commitment costs anything to make.

The products themselves are not GHRI's to sell. They are developed and sold by Galápagos Bio-Valorización, a separate commercial company now being constituted, which is bound by written agreement to return a fixed share of its gross revenue — gross, not profit — to GHRI restoration work. That instrument will be published on our governance page once executed. We are stating the intention now, while there is no money to argue about, because that is the only moment at which such a commitment costs anything to make.

My family settled in Santa Cruz in the early 1980s. The Scalesia forests and the volcanic soils that seemed willing to grow anything were the ordinary world of my childhood, and I assumed they were permanent.

They were not. I left to study medicine in Quito, eventually taking a PhD in biomedical sciences and spending the last decade as a physician-scientist at Stanford. My discipline has always been precision: tracing a signal through noise and isolating the single mechanism behind a disease.

For years, I wondered how those skills applied to my home community in the Galápagos. The answer came on visits back, watching dense, dark blackberry vines swallow open hillsides and seal ancient tortoise trails. My first instinct wasn't botanical; it was medical. It looked like a tumor. Like a malignancy, the blackberry infiltrates the highlands, commandeering resources until the host fails. And medicine teaches us that the goal of treatment is to remove the disease without destroying the patient — in this case, our ecosystem and the people living within it.

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.

But that was just the spark for a much larger idea. What if we stopped viewing invasive species solely as a costly burden, and started seeing them as a raw resource? Fungi were one answer, but there were others — wood, paper, durable goods. We could extract value from the invader to fund its own removal.

Everything that follows comes from one conviction: conservation that asks a community to sacrifice will be abandoned the moment the funding stops. We are Galapagueños. We do not just need to live in harmony with these islands; we need to build our livelihoods by keeping them intact. Make conservation economically viable, and the work continues without us. Get it wrong, and nothing else matters.

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

06b / Team

On the ground

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 · Director de Operaciones de Campo

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.

Field notes

What we are doing
right now

Short, dated, unedited. If a month is quiet, it says so.

2026-08Website updated: correction to our description of Leucaena toxicity, and a full public record of the ABG regulatory position. Details on the governance page.

2026-08Not funded by the Conservation, Food & Health Foundation. Around 1,000 applications were received and 35 went forward to full proposal; the Foundation also noted our status as a start-up organization. We said we would post outcomes either way. We will apply again in the 2027 cycle, with incorporation completed and co-funding confirmed.

2026-07Small-scale Rubus niveus extraction under way on private highland land, supplying resin and preservation trials.

2026-06The Galápagos Biosecurity Agency confirmed that no import procedure for edible fungi currently exists, and that a normative framework must be developed before our Pest Risk Analysis can be concluded (Oficio ABG-DVCB-2026-0319-O, 25 June 2026). No date has been given. Our fungal route waits; nothing else does.

2026-06Applications submitted to the Mohamed bin Zayed Species Conservation Fund, the Conservation, Food & Health Foundation, the Galápagos Conservancy small grants programme, and the Fondation Prince Albert II de Monaco.

2026-06Discussions under way with a virtual-fencing manufacturer on managed grazing for blackberry regrowth control.

2026-05Pest Risk Analysis for the sporeless Pleurotus strain filed with the ABG.

2026-04Incorporation as an Ecuadorian Fundación is under way, with completion expected in late 2026.

2026-04Agreement with Invitrolab (Quito) to support development of in vitro propagation protocols for Scalesia pedunculata.

2025-10Process opened with the Galápagos Biosecurity Agency on the import of an edible fungal strain — reviewer nomination and preliminary procedural steps.

07 / Contact

Work with us

GHRI welcomes communication from grant-making organizations, conservation researchers, academic institutions, and community partners — for research collaboration, funding, and institutional inquiries.

info@galapagoshri.org

Galápagos Habitat
Restoration Institute

ECUADOR

GALÁPAGOS ISLANDS

The invaders, pulled out

The endemics, raised

Restoring what
the islands were

This is also
the Galápagos.

This is what is
replacing it.

A silent emergency

A number no one
can picture