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Mission and history
The Guanacaste Dry Forest Conservation Fund (GDFCF) was established as a US 501(c)3 endowment fund in 1997. GDFCF's mission is to support forest restoration, purchase, wildlife preservation, and all other forms of conservation in Area de Conservación Guanacaste (ACG), Costa Rica. To date, GDFCF has funded the purchase of 13,500 hectares of forest containing more than 100,000 species for ACG expansion and forest restoration, and supports nine action projects for ACG for an annual cost of about $500,000.
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What is Area de Conservación Guanacaste (ACG)?
ACG is a 163,000 hectare national park in northwestern Costa Rica, stretching from 6 km out in the Pacific up to 2000 m at the top of Volcan Rincon de la Vieja, and then down to the Caribbean rain forested lowlands. Its stunning marine and tropical forest habitats (2% of the country) are home to an estimated 325,000 species of plants and animals (2.6% of the world's biodiversity). A UNESCO World Heritage Site, ACG conducts research and conservation action at the leading edge of ecology, evolutionary biology, biotechnology, biodiversity development, schoolchild education, decentralized administration, and integration with local, national and international society. Begun in 1971 as the 10,000 hectare Parque Nacional Santa Rosa (today, the Sector Santa Rosa of ACG), ACG now operates with an entirely resident Costa Rican staff recruited from its rural neighborhood and from Costa Rica's capital city of San Jose.
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How you can help
You contribute—we do the rest. Except for fees to payment processors and grants for specific action programs and the endowment, every penny donated to GDFCF goes to forest purchase to expand ACG. In the world of rapidly shrinking tropical biodiversity, bigger and more diverse is always better. As soon as the land is purchased, it is protected forever through inclusion in ACG as a decentralized portion of the Costa Rican Ministry of Environment, Energy and Telecommunications (MINAET).
This entire protection process is tried, true, and has been running since the inception of ACG in 1971 as one of Costa Rica's first national parks and its subsequent conversion to a Conservation Area in 1986.
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Selected scholarly articles about ACG and ACG programs
- » Janzen, D.H. 1987. How to grow a national park. Experientia 43.
- » Janzen, D.H. 1987. Editorial. Conservation Biology 1 (2).
- » Janzen, D.H. 2000. Costa Rica's Area de Conservación Guanacaste: a long march to survival through non-damaging biodevelopment. Biodiversity 1 (2).
- » Janzen, D.H. 2010. Hope for tropical biodiversity through true bioliteracy. Biotropica.
- » Full listing of scholarly articles.
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Selected websites about ACG and ACG programs
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Selected video about ACG and ACG programs
- » Dan Janzen on rainforest products
- » DNA barcoding and tropical bioliteracy
- » To save the rain forest
- » Paul Hebert and Daniel Janzen on DNA barcoding (Google Tech Talk)
- » I Bought a Rainforest: film and trailer
- » The Sky is Burning: trailer in English and Spanish
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Contact
Guanacaste Dry Forest Conservation Fund
c/o Professor Daniel Janzen
Department of Biology
University of Pennsylvania
3740 Hamilton Walk
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6018
215-898-5636 (telephone)
215-898-8780 (facsimile)
djanzen@sas.upenn.edu (email)
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Board of directors
Patrick Goodwillie
Winnie Hallwachs email
Jessie Hill
Daniel H. Janzen (President) email
Frank Joyce email
Anne Lambert
Terri McCarthy
Scott Miller email
Eric Palola (Executive Director) email
Rob Pringle
Steve Stroud email
Mark Van Putten (ex officio)
Bradley Zlotnick, MD email
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Donate
Except for fees to payment processors and grants for specific action programs and the endowment, every penny donated to GDFCF goes to forest purchase to expand ACG. You may donate online using Google Checkout and Paypal, or by check.