Qualla: Ecuadorian dry forests

Ecuadorian dry forests: Introduction

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 3.0. One percent. That is how much of the original Ecuadorian dry forest still stands. Of an ecoregion that once stretched over 2.1 million hectares across the Pacific coast of Ecuador, ninety-nine percent has been cleared for farms, banana plantations, sugar cane, and cattle grazing. What remains is scattered, secondary-growth remnants - small islands of dry forest in a sea of agriculture, home to some of the rarest birds in South America and a flora that nobody will see anywhere else in the world. The World Wildlife Fund classifies this ecoregion as Critical or Endangered. Western Ecuador has one of the greatest risks of biological extinction anywhere on Earth.

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Image: CC BY-SA 3.0

Ecuadorian dry forests: A Pacific Dry Forest

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Arabsalam, CC BY-SA 4.0. Tropical dry forests are an unusual ecosystem anywhere. They occur where the climate is equatorial and warm but rainfall is concentrated in a short wet season, leaving long dry stretches that force plants to adapt in specific ways. The Ecuadorian dry forests cover land sloping fr...

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Image: Arabsalam | CC BY-SA 4.0

Ecuadorian dry forests: A Biodiversity Hotspot

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 3.0. The ecoregion sits inside the Tumbes-Choco-Magdalena biodiversity hotspot - one of only twenty-five regions globally identified as holding significant biodiversity under critical threat. It is also part of a larger 103,000-square-kilometer ecoregion called the Tumbesian-Andean Va...

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Image: CC BY-SA 3.0

Ecuadorian dry forests: The Tree That Rots

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit No machine-readable author provided. Alfredobi assumed (based on copyright claims)., Public domain. One tree in the Ecuadorian dry forest survives by cheating. The Ceiba trichastandra, a kapok species, has evolved green bark that photosynthesizes directly - meaning the tree can keep making food during the dry season when it has shed all its leaves to conserve water. The strateg...

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Image: No machine-readable author provided. Alfredobi assumed (based on copyright claims). | Public domain

Ecuadorian dry forests: The Birds That Vanished Elsewhere

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bert Harris, CC BY-SA 3.0. Birders travel to the Ecuadorian dry forests specifically for species they cannot see anywhere else. The list includes the great green macaw (Ara ambiguus), the grey-cheeked parakeet (Brotogeris pyrrhoptera), the Esmeraldas woodstar (Chaetocercus berlepschi) - a hummingbird endem...

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Image: Bert Harris | CC BY-SA 3.0

Ecuadorian dry forests: Ninety-Nine Percent Lost

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit No machine-readable author provided. Alfredobi assumed (based on copyright claims)., Public domain. The destruction of the Ecuadorian dry forest is one of the most dramatic habitat losses in the Americas. Ninety-nine percent of the original dry forest has been cleared - primarily for agriculture, with selective logging of the most valuable species and slash-and-burn clearance f...

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Image: No machine-readable author provided. Alfredobi assumed (based on copyright claims). | Public domain

Ecuadorian dry forests: Machalilla

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 3.0. If the Ecuadorian dry forest has a flagship park, it is Machalilla National Park on the coast of Manabi Province. The park protects remnants of both dry and moist forests and catalogs an extraordinary richness within its bounds: 234 bird species recorded, 81 mammal species, and t...

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Image: CC BY-SA 3.0