The foundation's core work is running biological reserves - protected patches of forest ranging from roughly four to twenty-five square kilometers, each paired with a research station that can host scientists, students, and volunteers. Two sit east of the Andes in Amazonian Ecuador, including the original Jatun Sacha Biological Reserve in the upper Napo basin. Two more protect high-altitude cloud forest along the Andean spine. Two guard the country's Pacific coast, including Bilsa in the Mache-Chindul mountains. One reaches all the way out to the Galapagos, on San Cristobal. A single NGO managing reserves across four of Ecuador's major ecoregions is unusual. It reflects the foundation's stated mission: to protect Ecuadorian biodiversity through research, education, and what the charter calls the training of leaders with ethnic and gender participation.

Most conservation budgets in Ecuador are small. Jatun Sacha learned early that keeping multiple reserves running requires hands, and that hands will come a long way for the chance to live in a cloud forest. The foundation developed one of the first large-scale conservation volunteer programs in South America. People arrive from Europe, North America, and Asia - partnered in part through the New Zealand-based Global Volunteer Network - to plant trees, teach in rural schools, assist biologists with species surveys, and help with sustainable agriculture trials. Volunteers pay for their own room and board, which keeps the stations operating between grant cycles. For the volunteers, the reward is the kind of direct contact with Ecuador's wild country that a tourist itinerary cannot provide.

Each station is a small laboratory. Bilsa, on the Pacific coast, has recorded more than 1,100 species of vascular plants, some of them described to science only recently. Its Center for Conserving Plants of the Western Forest produces about 100,000 trees a year for reforestation - 80 species of tropical fruit trees and 50 species of native timber trees - raised in nurseries and planted out on reserve land and on neighboring farms. Guandera protects high-altitude paramo and cloud forest in Carchi province. The Amazon station at Jatun Sacha has hosted decades of work on Napo-basin herpetology, botany, and indigenous plant knowledge. The reserves are also connected to the wider conservation world. The foundation works with the World Wide Fund for Nature, the International Union for Conservation of Nature, and Conservation International, functioning as Ecuadorian partner to organizations that cannot easily operate reserves themselves.

The challenge Jatun Sacha faces has not gotten easier. The Pacific lowland forests of northwest Ecuador - the Choco - are among the most threatened ecoregions on the continent. The Amazon frontier keeps advancing with roads and oil palm. The Andean cloud forests are being cleared for cattle pasture in places where grass will never truly grow well. Against that, a network of small protected areas can seem modest. But biological reserves do more than protect what is inside them. They function as seed banks, training grounds for a generation of Ecuadorian biologists, and proof that land can be managed in a way that benefits both people and forests. The big forest is smaller than it was in 1989. Without the work done in Jatun Sacha's name, it would be smaller still.