Arenal Volcano and vegetation in Costa Rica as seen from Monteverde. The volcano is within the country's Arenal Tilaran Conservation Area © Peter Andersen, licensed under CC by SA 3.0.
Principal Investigator
Project summary
- Focus: Using biodiversity data to create tools for conservation and sustainable forest use in Central America
We are creating tools for biodiversity conservation and sustainable use of forests in Central America.
Using biological collections and taxonomic knowledge as sources of biodiversity data, we are focusing on:
- producing conservation tools such as checklists and biodiversity maps to support the Convention on Biological Diversity and its Global Strategy for Plant Conservation (GSPC)
- building taxonomic capacity for Central America
- producing tools that support the sustainable use of forests or forest crops, for example shade coffee, the non-timber forest product Brosimum alicastrum, and the use of agroforestry in the Bolivian Amazon to modify the tempo of slash-and-burn agriculture.
Museum staff
Biodiversity research
We are creating molecular and digital tools to explore undiscovered biodiversity
Plants research
Studying a wide variety of plants, including bryophytes, ferns and flowering plants
Botany collections
Explore our collection of an estimated six million specimens from around the world