Website of Area de Conservacion Guanacaste (ACG)
The new ACG website has a tremendous amount of information about its management, research (including parataxonomists and longterm research projects), education (including PEB and Marine Bioawareness, called Biosensibilizacion Marina in Spanish), ecotourism, explanatory videos, photos, panoramas, Gigapan images, natural sounds, maps, GIS layers, and especially the parataxonomist-written species pages of caterpillars and food plants. And more. At this time the site is in Spanish only, but videos have English subtitiles.
Green Phoenix - the book
Any student of ACG will enjoy award-winning science writer William Allen's in-depth profile entitled Green Phoenix: Restoring the Tropical Forests of Guanacaste, which presents a lively view of the early political history, the land deals, and key personalities involved in building Area de Conservación Guanacaste (ACG) into what is it is today, including Daniel Janzen, Winnie Hallwachs, Alvaro Ugalde, Oscar Arias, Jose Maria Figueres, Alvaro Umana, and the forerunner to GDFCF, the Proyecto Parque Nacional Guanacaste. The popular first edition, published in 2001 (Oxford University Press) is still available in paperback, and William Allen is now working on a second and updated edition.
Costa Rican Natural History - the book
Another key resource for those looking for more in depth information on Costan Rican biology is the seminal book edited by Daniel Janzen in 1983 entitled Costa Rican Natural History, which is available in paperback in English. As of June 2013, the Spanish version can be downloaded for free from the ACG website and from other servers in Costa Rica. (Thanks particularly to Luciano Capelli for making this possible.)
UN World Heritage Sites
Área de Conservación Guanacaste is one of fewer than 200 globally significant natural heritage sites recognized by the United Nations World Heritage Commission. (Most of the sites are of cultural significance, approximately 800). Click here for information on this program.
Santa Rosa weather station
Real time readout from Santa Rosa weather station, located near the dormitories in the Administration Area of Santa Rosa, Sector Santa Rosa of ACG, in collaboration with the Instituto Meteorológico Nacional de Costa Rica. Archives of weather records for Santa Rosa and other ACG stations are available on the ACG website.
Butterflies of America
A website that features many photographs from the caterpillar rearing project of GDFCF/ACG. Most of the ACG specimens here were found, reared, databased, and sometimes photographed by the parataxonomists. As an example, explore the links for Porphorogenes peterwegei.
DNA barcoding of species
For the last ten years, the ACG biodiversity inventory has come to rely on the relatively new tool of DNA barcoding for species identification and new species discovery of the many thousands of species found – and still being found – in ACG. The tool was pioneered by Dr. Paul Hebert and his team at the University of Guelph, Ontario. The technique of DNA barcoding is literally revolutionizng modern taxonomy and becoming standardized through projects by the International Barcode of Life (iBOL) and BIOSCAN.