Head to the Ecudorian Cloud Forest and Mashpi Lodge this autumn to become of one of the first people to help the expert teams track and collect data from the hugely diverse wildlife population, in one of the most sparsely populated and stunning spots on earth.
Alice Pritchard
Mon 31 Jul 2017
Mashpi Lodge is both a pioneering scientific research centre and a 24 room eco-hotel that sits in a 3,000 protected reserve in Ecuador that uses both sustainable tourism and forest preservation as a conservation strategy. Guests can now live like naturalists to experience the reserve’s ecosystem from a scientific perspective.
Image Over 300 species of butterfly call the Mashpi forest their home
The Mashpi Laboratory is a new addition to the complex and it will be home to ongoing natural experiments that include surveying the enormous number of butterflies and seeing how they adapt to climate change and also the way bees, reptiles and amphibians behave. The eco-reserve is fundamental to ongoing global research into many different species.
Guests can also explore this amazing forest in the dead of night to track nocturnal frogs and birds with its Wildlife Research Director or glide through the canopy of the trees on the hotel’s gondola, to get a new perspective on the natural world.
