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New (and Excellent) Article on BioAlfa

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On June 11, 2019, Environment Minister Carlos Manuel Rodríguez and President Carlos Alvarado signed the BioAlfa decree, confirming government support for this initiative.

In this excellent article, “Planting the Seeds for a Bioliterate Tropical Society,” journalist Nancy Bazilchuk chronicles how BioAlfa came to be. The piece, in Norwegian SciTech News, was written in advance of several events occurring this week in Trondheim, Norway: the 8th International Barcode of Life conference and the Big Challenge Science Festival. GDFCF’s President, Dan Janzen, and Vice President, Winnie Hallwachs, spoke at both events as part of an effort to spread the word globally about BioAlfa. In the article, Torbjørn Ekrem, who heads the Norwegian Barcode of Life program, says that if BioAlfa succeeds, it would be “an enormous achievement. Costa Rica would be the first tropical country to know the genetic signatures of all its species — and they have roughly 1 million species in that little country.”