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Daniel Janzen

Dan Janzen at work with pet porcupine Espinita exploring his cheek, and 1999 vintage laptop

Daniel Janzen (djanzen@sas.upenn.edu) is DiMaura Professor of Conservation Biology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA, and Technical Advisor to Área de Conservación Guanacaste (ACG). ACG is a 169,000-hectare government/private hybrid Conservation Area in northwestern Costa Rica. He is a tropical ecologist and biodiversity conservationist with 69 years of field experience and 588 scientific papers and books, all focused on the interactions of tropical animals and plants, and for the past 37 years, on their permanent in-situ conservation as well (http://janzen.sas.upenn.edu). He is a world level authority on the taxonomy and biology of tropical caterpillars, and is a member of the US and the Costa Rican National Academy of Sciences, and recipient of the Crafoord Prize (1984), the Kyoto Prize (1997), BBVA Prize (2012), and Blue Planet Prize (2014). He and his biologist wife Dr. Winnie Hallwachs (whallwac@sas.upenn.edu) are co-architects and co-constructors, along with hundreds of others, of ACG and of Costa Rica's INBio (Instituto Nacional de Biodiversidad), and of Costa Rica's Iniciativa Paz con la Naturaleza (IPN) (2006-2010), which morphed into Costa Rica Forever. He is President of the Guanacaste Dry Forest Conservation Fund (GDFCF; http://www.gdfcf.org), the US-based NGO for ACG. He and Hallwachs are currently focused on facilitating the International Barcode of Life (iBOL) efforts to DNA barcode all species of the world (BioScan) for their identification and species discovery by anyone anywhere at any time, and simultaneously, on facilitating Costa Rica's willingness to permanently conserve the 4% of the world's biodiversity that lives on 25% of Costa Rican national terrain and sea, and do it as a global example of sustainable non-damaging use of tropical wildland biodiversity by a bioliterate tropical country.