In Ecuador, a mountain shrub could hold the key to restoring a precious ecosystem

EL ÁNGEL, Ecuador — The view outside from this eco-hotel in northern Ecuador reveals vast hillsides still scarred by fires. In late January 2024, large flames roared past the wooden cabins that make up the Polylepis Lodge in the rural town of El Ángel in Carchi province, consuming delicate stretches of the páramo, the high-altitude ecosystem that’s home to unique flora and fauna species and an important freshwater source in the region.

A team of volunteers and firefighters managed to stop the blaze after four days, but by then more than 1,600 hectares (4,000 acres) of páramo had already been scorched. It wiped out scores of Espeletia plants, commonly known as frailejon, a rare shrub species that’s perhaps the páramo’s most emblematic plant and is endemic to the tropical mountains of Ecuador, Colombia and Venezuela.

One year after the wildfire, the blackened stems of frailejones dot the landscape. A team of amateur botanists and hotel workers at the Polylepis Lodge are working toward reversing some of the damage. Tucked away in the souvenir shop of the high-end hotel is a nursery, set up to propagate the frailejones and replenish the plant population devastated by the wildfire.

“What we strive for is to reproduce these plants and to give back to these areas that are being destroyed by wildfires and the expansion of the agricultural frontier,” says Juan Fernando Acosta, the Polylepis owner and founder of the nursery. “The idea is to save these majestic plants, which help to guarantee drinking water for northern Ecuador.”

In Ecuador’s El Ángel Ecological Reserve, the páramo stretches out for miles and supplies most of the drinking water for the nearby towns of El Ángel and Tulcán. Plants like frailejones play a critical role in guaranteeing local water security by absorbing moisture from the atmosphere and channeling excess water into the ground, transforming fog into full-flowing streams and rivers.

But frailejones have come increasingly under threat by extensive agriculture and mining in South America. In Colombia, home to the world’s largest expanse of páramo, conservationists have resorted to replanting them with the help of nurseries since 2016. Now, the model is being replicated in Ecuador, and the Polylepis Lodge’s nursery is considered the first attempt in the country.

“There’s still much to learn about the páramos,” says Robinson Salazar Díaz, a biologist and expert in frailejon propagation in Colombia. “There’s a lot that can be learned through the process [of a nursery.]”

Building a frailejon nursery

One morning in November 2024, Giuseppe Endara, a 27-year-old worker at the Polylepis Lodge, gets up early to tend to the tiny frailejones, housed in a corner of the souvenir shop. From the room’s floor-to-ceiling windows, a brownish-green hill covered in charred frailejones comes into view. For the next hour, Endara will dote on the young frailejones, drawing water collected from the páramo into an eye dropper and gently showering each plant. 

Then he turns to a row of tiny seeds, nestled among soft cotton swabs in a sterilized petri dish. The seeds are picked from frailejon flowers, dried and sterilized before being left in controlled conditions. They’re expected to germinate over the next 20 days, and in the meantime, Endara inspects them for signs of fungus or other contaminants. 

The nursery opened in 2023 as part of an effort by the Polylepis Lodge to restore the páramo that surrounds the eco-lodge. But setting up a frailejon nursery can be a long, arduous experiment. Frailejon propagation remains underresearched, and the local subspecies of frailejon they’re working with has never been mass reproduced. The subspecies, known by the scientific name Espeletia pycnophylla angelensis, named after the reserve, is endemic to Ecuador, and the lodge’s work is unprecedented.

“We’re trying to figure out what is the best way to propagate the frailejones,” Endara says.

For Endara, who isn’t a trained biologist, that can prove to be a challenge. During the lodge’s pilot project in 2023, which Endara didn’t participate in, only 16 plants survived out of 2,000 seeds. A second attempt produced three plants. Endara says some of the germinated seeds withered because of fungal infection because they weren’t properly sterilized. 

But since then, visiting experts, including Salazar Díaz, have helped them to perfect the process. Endara has learned to collect seeds during the blooming season to ensure that more seeds germinate. He wears a surgical mask and cleans his hands before planting seeds in the petri dish, to prevent contamination and accelerate germination. By gathering seeds from different lots, they hope to determine which areas perform best and improve their germination rates.

Their new objective is to produce 1,000 plants, from about 6,500 seeds they collected in September and October 2024. The process is slow but valuable, Endara tells Mongabay.

“To start a nursery you have to love nature because the process is tedious,” he says as he examines a petri dish under a magnifying glass. “The results are few and slow to manifest, and you have to check on the plants every day, but you do it because you care.”

Protecting the páramo

Nestled in the Andes of northern Ecuador, El Ángel Ecological Reserve spans more than 16,000 hectares (40,000 acres). The reserve, established in 1992 to protect the vast tracts of páramo, is a source of water for Carchi province. 

The protected area of páramos has helped the area weather the historic 2024 drought that dried up rivers in the Ecuadorian Amazon, where important hydroelectric dams are located and which ground to a halt, causing costly, months-long blackouts.

But the reserve has been losing ground to potato farming and cattle ranching, the two biggest drivers of the local economy. In some areas, large swaths of frailejones give way to grassy fields and roving cattle. Fires are set deliberately, such as the one in January 2024, to clear the native vegetation for agricultural purposes. 

Miguel Montenegro, director of environmental management for Carchi province, says almost every hectare of the reserve is privately owned, making it difficult for the local government to tackle deforestation. The province is, however, rolling out programs to reward landowners for protecting the páramo with incentives like land tax exemptions and farming equipment, Montenegro says. In some areas, the government is also buying land.

Polylepis’s Acosta says the lodge’s nursery can complement these efforts. He plans to start restoring the affected frailejones on his property. But to expand their work to other parts of the reserve, they’ll need the cooperation of landowners.

“We don’t know how many people will want to lose their farmland to restore frailejones,” he says.

Esteban Suárez, an expert in páramo restoration and biology professor at San Francisco University in Quito, says another challenge the initiative faces is that restoring an ecosystem requires a more holistic approach. Suárez, who isn’t involved in the project, says it’s more important to know what vegetation was present before the ecosystem was degraded in order to reintroduce those species. To restore the páramo requires replanting more than just the frailejones, he tells Mongabay.

“ One of the elements that you would want to restore are the frailejones because we know that [they] have been there for thousands of years, but you would also restore, for example, páramo grasses or small shrubs,” Suárez says.

While the Polylepis Lodge may eventually seek to grow other vegetation from the páramo, its first mission is to learn to mass-produce frailejones. Along with getting landowners in the reserve involved, the aim is to encourage guests to participate as part of an educational effort. 

“The idea is to raise environmental awareness by bringing people to plant frailejones and to show them where their water comes from and why páramos are so important,” Endara says.

Back at the lodge, a family of three takes a tour through the surrounding páramo after visiting the frailejon nursery. Hailing from Santo Domingo, a city on Ecuador’s coast, the family says they’ve never seen a frailejon before or weren’t aware of the ecosystem services it provides. 

They marvel at the tall, fuzzy-leafed specimens and stop to observe the blackened patches of torched frailejones, while Endara explains the plant’s ability to produce drinking water. It’s an effort to convince tourists to support conservation efforts to protect these fragile ecosystems. 

“We try to plant a seed in every person that visits,” Endara says.

Banner image: The frailejon subspecies Espeletia pycnophylla subsp. angelensis is endemic to Ecuador and Colombia and most commonly found in the El Ángel Ecological Reserve. Image by Christina Noriega.

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This story first appeared on Mongabay

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