Área de Conservación Guanacaste is a protected area (and UNESCO World Heritage Site) in northwestern Costa Rica (province of Guanacaste) considered a worldwide model for involving local communities in landscape-scale conservation, for forest restoration, as a successful collaboration between a non-governmental organization and a national park, and for fostering a bioliterate local population. Thanks in part to the efforts of renowned biologists Daniel H. Janzen and Winnie Hallwachs, ACG charted a distinct path as it grew from the small 10,000-ha Parque Nacional Santa Rosa created in 1971 to span 163,000 hectares stretching from 6 km out into the Pacific Ocean across the dry forest coastal plain, over the cloud forest on three volcanoes (Cordillera Guanacaste) and down into the Caribbean rain forest (70 m elevation).
Internationally recognized as an outstanding example of biodiversity-based conservation, ACG represents the largest landscape restoration project in the Neotropics. ACG conserves an estimated ~2.5% of the world’s biodiversity, containing as many species--~350,000+--as in two-thirds of North America, and 65% of Costa Rica’s biodiversity. ACG has demonstrated that it’s possible to restore large areas of natural forest that had been destroyed by 400 years of European-style farming, burning, ranching, logging, and hunting, and to do it employing a local Costa Rican work force drawn in large part from the surrounding agropastoral landscape.
This was accomplished through strategic land acquisition and innovative methods of habitat restoration. Janzen and ACG also pioneered the role of the “parataxonomist”, defined by Janzen as “a person derived from a rural work force who has been on-the-job trained, facilitated, and stimulated to be able to carry out quality field inventory as a graduate student in taxonomy or ecology could”. The Guanacaste Dry Forest Conservation Fund, which works with ACG, now employs more than thirty parataxonomists, who in addition to collecting scientific data provide the human presence needed to protect ACG. These are good jobs -- meaningful careers for local community members, some of whom have gone on to rise within the ranks of the park administration. Lastly, ACG is also remarkable in providing hands-on education to students, and sometimes their parents, at all schools ringing ACG. Today, this involves about 2,500 students per year, focused on 4th, 5th and 6th graders, in 50+ schools and accounts for about 20% of the ACG budget.
Ecosystem: Forest , Resources: Wildlife , Big Issues: Biodiversity , Big Issues: Education , Solutions: Ecological restoration
