By Nicola S. Flanagan and Andres Navia-Samboni
Vanilla beans have long been gathered from the rainforests of Colombia's Pacific coast by the Afro-descendant and Indigenous communities who live there, being valued for their use in ceremonial rituals. Amongst the Afro-descendant communities, the plants are known as bejuquillo (little vine), and the beans are called platanitos, for their appearance like small bananas.
With the growing global demand for natural vanilla, in 2015 the local community councils in the municipality of Bahía Solano, department of Chocó, Colombia initiated the project "Vainilla Aroma Chocó” with support from SWISSAID to promote the sustainable cultivation of the native vanilla found in their territories.
In 2020, as part of our ongoing research on the ecology, conservation and sustainable use of neotropical vanilla, we were invited to collaborate with the communities in their work documenting the diversity and distributions of Vanilla species in their forests.
The Chocó region is one of the wettest places on Earth and one of the most biodiverse. Its tropical humid forests, forming part of the Tumbes-Chocó-Magdalena Biodiversity Hotspot, extend from southeast Panama down the lowland Pacific region of Colombia west of the Andes, and into northwest Ecuador. In northern Colombia, this ecosystem also reaches inland towards the Magdalena River. These forests are a haven for wild relatives for several important crops, including cacao (Theobroma and Herrania genera), and vanilla. While Mexico is considered the center of domestication for the main cultivated vanilla, Vanilla planifolia, this species´ natural distribution extends through the humid tropical forests of Central America and into western Colombia.
In our previous research in the Chocó over more than a decade, we had documented eight wild Vanilla species. These are important crop wild relatives - species or populations closely related to the domesticated plants - carrying potentially valuable genetic resources: traits like pest and disease resistance or tolerance to environmental change that can be bred into the cultivated crop. As such, they are priorities for conservation action. Yet, despite the immense global value of the vanilla crop, its wild relatives have been surprisingly neglected in botanical studies, with poor representation in biological collections. Since conservation and management decisions are only possible once a species has a formal name, documenting the diversity and distribution of vanilla's crop wild relatives is a key task.
Over several field trips with members of the community councils Los Delfines, El Cedro and Río Valle, we surveyed the species diversity of vanilla plants previously located by our local collaborators. Bahia Solano is only accessible by air – a short but often bumpy flight over the Western Andean Cordillera from Medellin, and logistical costs have limited our visits. Also, Vanilla species flower sporadically, and not all species flower simultaneously, so it wasn´t until 2024 that we registered a morphotype that differed from the other species that we knew in Bahía Solano, in the Chocó, and, eventually, as we would ascertain, from every other Vanilla species documented anywhere.
In order to validate this new-to-science species, we consulted the taxonomic literature for the genus Vanilla, as well as undertaking the arduous task of comparing the specimen with those contained in over 50 different herbaria in both Colombia and globally. During this herbarium study, we found three further specimens of this new species – one also from Bahía Solano deposited in a Colombian herbarium in 1989, and two from northwest Ecuador housed in the Herbarium of the National Institute of Biodiversity, INABIO in Quito, both from collections in 1991. All these specimens had been identified as Vanilla planifolia, to which our new species is morphologically similar.
Given the extension of the species distribution along the Pacific coast of Colombia and into Ecuador, in consultation with all study members we named the species Vanilla pacifica.
Our survey of herbarium specimens yielded a further important find, a first register for Colombia of another vanilla crop wild relative, Vanilla hartii. This species was known previously from Central America and northeast South America, but not from Colombia.
The Chocó region still retains much of its native forest ecosystem, thanks, in large part, to its inaccessibility. Nonetheless, with expansion of agricultural activities, and infrastructure development deforestation is increasing, as well as from the recent proliferation of illegal opencast gold mining. Vanilla pacifica is known from only three localities, and following the IUCN Red List criteria is categorized as critically endangered. The loss of only one of the populations would be a severe blow to the species’ survival potential, as well being a loss of potentially valuable genetic resources. A conservation action plan is now urgently needed, including in situ conservation in protected areas, as well as in an ex situ germplasm bank.
Fortunately, the local community councils in Bahía Solano have developed sustainable management plans to ensure the long-term preservation of the biodiversity present in their collective lands. These territories indigenous and afro-descendent communities in Colombia are recognized as Other Effective Conservation Measures (OECMs), where lower deforestation rates reflect the deep knowledge and sustainable environmental stewardship by the communities that depend on these ecosystems.
Bridging scientific and local knowledge to describe Vanilla pacifica is the first, essential step for the safeguarding of this species. Now, within the framework of the project “Vainilla Aroma Chocó”, this species will be included in Vanilla conservation and sustainable management plans in the territories of the community councils.
The article “Vanilla pacifica (Orchidaceae), a new wild relative of the vanilla crop native to the Chocó region” is available in Discover Plants: https://doi.org/10.1007/s44372-026-00733-7