For the first time in more than 150 years, giant tortoises are returning to the wild on Floreana Island in the Gal\u00e1pagos \u2014 guided by NASA satellite data that helps scientists discover where the animals can find food, water, and nesting habitat.<\/p>\n
The effort, a collaboration between the Gal\u00e1pagos National Park Directorate and Gal\u00e1pagos Conservancy, marks a key milestone in restoring tortoise populations to one of the most ecologically distinctive archipelagos on Earth.<\/p>\n
On Floreana Island, tortoises disappeared in the mid-1800s after heavy hunting by whalers and the introduction of new predators like pigs and rats, which consumed tortoise eggs and hatchlings. Without the tortoises, the island began to change. Across the Gal\u00e1pagos, giant tortoises historically helped shape the landscape by grazing vegetation, opening pathways through dense plant growth, and carrying seeds across islands.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is exactly the kind of project where NASA Earth observations make a difference,\u201d said Keith Gaddis, the manager for NASA Earth Action\u2019s Biological Diversity and Ecological Forecasting program at NASA Headquarters in Washington. \u201cWe\u2019re helping partners answer a practical question: Where will these animals have the best chance to survive \u2014 not just today, but decades from now?\u201d<\/p>\n
On Feb. 20, the Gal\u00e1pagos National Park Directorate and conservation partners released 158 giant tortoises at two sites on Floreana.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt’s a huge deal to have these tortoises back on this island. Charles Darwin was one of the last people to see them there,\u201d said James Gibbs, the Gal\u00e1pagos Conservancy\u2019s Vice President of Science and Conservation and a co-principal investigator of the project.<\/p>\n
In 2000, scientists made an unexpected discovery. Gibbs and other researchers found unusual tortoises on northern Isabela Island\u2019s Wolf Volcano, the tallest peak in the Gal\u00e1pagos, that did not look like any other known living tortoises. About a decade later, DNA extracted from bones of the extinct Floreana tortoises \u2014 found in caves on the island and in museum collections \u2014 confirmed the tortoises carried Floreana ancestry, launching a breeding program that has since produced hundreds of offspring expected to return to the island. Researchers believe that whalers likely moved tortoises between the islands more than a century earlier.<\/p>\n
The Gal\u00e1pagos National Park Directorate has raised and released across the Gal\u00e1pagos more than 10,000 tortoises over the last 60 years, one of the largest rewilding efforts ever attempted. But each island presents a different puzzle.<\/p>\n
Some hills and small mountains in the Gal\u00e1pagos intercept clouds and stay cool and damp with evergreen vegetation. Others are dry enough that green vegetation appears only briefly after rain. Where these zones occur on the same island, tortoises move between them, with some animals traveling miles each year between seasonal feeding and nesting areas.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt’s difficult for the tortoises because they get introduced from captivity into this environment,\u201d Gibbs said. \u201cThey don\u2019t know where food is. They don\u2019t know where water is. They don\u2019t know where to nest. If you can place them where conditions are already right, you give them a much better chance.\u201d<\/p>\n
That\u2019s where NASA satellite data comes in.<\/p>\n
NASA Earth observations allow scientists to map environmental conditions across the islands and track how vegetation, moisture, and temperature shift over time \u2014 clues to where tortoises can find food and water.<\/p>\n
Using those records, Gibbs and Giorgos Mountrakis, the project\u2019s principal investigator, and their team built a decision tool that combines satellite measurements of habitat and climate conditions with millions of field observations of tortoise locations across the archipelago to guide where, and when, to release the animals.<\/p>\n
\u201cHabitat suitability models and environmental mapping are essential tools,\u201d said Christian Sevilla, the Director of Ecosystems at the Gal\u00e1pagos National Park Directorate. \u201cThey allow us to integrate climate, topography, and vegetation data to make evidence-based decisions. We move from intuition to precision.\u201d<\/p>\n
The decision tool draws on multiple NASA and partner satellite missions. Landsat and European Sentinel satellites track vegetation conditions. The Global Precipitation Measurement mission provides rainfall data. The Terra satellite helps estimate land-surface temperature, and terrain data adds elevation and landscape features. In some cases, high-resolution commercial satellite images, acquired through NASA\u2019s Commercial Smallsat Data Acquisition Program, help teams evaluate potential release sites before field surveys begin.<\/p>\n
With tortoise-environment relationships in hand, the team can map habitat suitability today and forecast how it may shift decades into the future as environmental conditions change.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe forecasting part is critical,\u201d said Mountrakis, of the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse. \u201cThis isn\u2019t a one-year project. We\u2019re looking at where tortoises will succeed 20, 40 years from now.\u201d<\/p>\n
Because the tortoises can live more than a century, habitat conditions decades from now matter as much as conditions today.<\/p>\n
The tortoise release is part of the larger Floreana Ecological Restoration Project, which aims to remove invasive species like rats and feral cats and eventually return 12 native animal species to the island, with tortoises serving as the keystone for rebuilding the ecosystem. <\/p>\n
The Gal\u00e1pagos Conservancy is also using NASA satellite data and the decision tool developed to help guide tortoise releases on other Gal\u00e1pagos islands and to plan future reintroductions across the archipelago.<\/p>\n
If successful, Floreana Island could once again support a large tortoise population, helping restore relationships between animals, plants, and the landscape that shaped the island for thousands of years. <\/p>\n
\u201cFor those of us who live and work in Gal\u00e1pagos, this [release] is deeply meaningful,\u201d Sevilla said. \u201cIt demonstrates that large-scale ecological restoration is possible and that, with science and long-term commitment, we can recover an essential part of the archipelago\u2019s natural heritage.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For the first time in more than 150 years, giant tortoises are returning to the wild on Floreana…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":309417,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[3224,145204,1507,31339,61,60,137641,12904,82,247,116704,131717,263],"class_list":{"0":"post-309416","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-space","8":"tag-earth","9":"tag-global-precipitation-measurement-gpm","10":"tag-goddard-space-flight-center","11":"tag-human-dimensions","12":"tag-ie","13":"tag-ireland","14":"tag-landsat","15":"tag-life-on-earth","16":"tag-science","17":"tag-space","18":"tag-terra","19":"tag-vegetation","20":"tag-wildlife"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309416","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=309416"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309416\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/309417"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=309416"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=309416"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=309416"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}