CDF MONTHLY NEWS BULLETIN
We would like to share news about our work with you. This is what we have been doing during October in the Charles Darwin Foundation (CDF):
- We started the month at sea on board the Mary Anne, with representatives from the Galapagos National Park and the tourism sector. We were participating in a workshop to define the early stages of a process that will lead to a new model for tourism.
- We also have some good news of our own. After an arduous selection process, Aldo Jaramillo has joined our team as the new CDF Head of Human Resources. Among his first tasks were the interviews to choose the Director of Science, whose name we hope to share with you in our next bulletin.
- As for management, our new field team in Floreana monitored the critically endangered plants of the island. The good news is that since the eradication of the goats, five native plants have recovered. The bad: two sites of important biodiversity in Floreana are threatened by invasive plants, but we are working on this.
- Project work has not slowed down. We have a new project with students from the Central University of Ecuador, which consists of creating gardens of native plants at the entrance to Puerto Ayora. For this we are collaborating with the Santa Cruz local authorities, with the electricity company, the firefighters and Petrocomercial.
- Furthermore, we are moving ahead with monitoring the blackberry in Floreana. 21 Park wardens and CDF staff have studied 43 hectares, in which 254 blackberry plants were found.
- But our monitoring has also produced some encouraging data. This month we are analysing the information gathered during the September census of penguins and cormorants. We can now count on an estimated population of 1770 penguins, which means that the species is stable. And 1927 cormorants, which is the highest population since monitoring of this species began in 1977.
- In addition, we supported SESA SICGAL in drawing up the blueprint for a census of domestic introduced species in the rural areas of the four inhabited islands.
- With SESA SICGAL and the Fabricio Valverde Epidemiology, Pathology and Genetic Laboratory of the Park we have been preparing for the possible arrival of two serious illnesses in Galapagos - West Nile Virus and avian flu. Our partners in this project included members of the Farming Committee-SICGAL, SNEM, CIMEI, poultry farmers and the environmental police. Thus the Rapid Response Team for Health Crises was founded.
- Finally we can announce that we are finishing the evaluation of the state of conservation of 108 endemic species of moths in Galapagos. We discovered that one moth species of Espanola is critically endangered, 15 species are in danger of extinction and 22 species are vulnerable. These assessments will be sent to IUCN (World Conservation Union) for inclusion in the Red List.
- All that remains to be said is that collaborative work has been important during October, because, together with the Park, we started a rat eradication campaign on Seymour North. This was successful and we have now moved on to the monitoring stage. Moreover, again together with the Park, we have been monitoring iguanas and cactus on Baltra, using the new method of distance estimation. In this way, we registered more than 700 iguanas, many of them in areas where they were not expected to be, and maps were made of cactus density, which will allow us to track population trends in the future.
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