Actions Performed By Costa Rican Institutions To Sustain Environment Of The Country

The country of Costa Rica has a total of 11 Conservation Areas throughout their region and water borders. One of the regions is called the Area de Conservacion Guanacaste (ACG) and it is based on the northwest Pacific shore of Costa Rica. This region has an area of 163,000 hectares, 43,000 hectares are marine, and it also encompasses 150 kilometers of guarded shoreline. It was announced to be a UNESCO World Heritage Natural Site in 1999. In 2015 the program titled BioMar ACG began and its objective was to document all of the marine organisms in the region.

All of this intelligence is catalogued, photographed, bard coded, and stationed at the Museum of Zoology that is located at the Universidad de Costa Rica and then is made accessible to the general population through the internet.

The region of ACG was formerly analyzed by numerous marine based expeditions from the United States of America in the 1930’s where they removed samples and composed papers. Numerous institutions, collections of researchers, and individuals have made contributions to the accumulated knowledge of ACG marine biodiversity. Some examples are Elmer Y. Dawson’s documentation on the different groups of macro algae located in Costa Rica, Hughes and Richard’s work on assessing marine turtles in the ACG, Monks and Marques observations on fish parasites, and the Instituo Nacional de Biodiversidad collection of various mollusks in the ACG. There are many more instances of these research projects of marine animals in the ACG over recent years. The central convention of these research projects is to obtain a baseline of the marine biodiversity of ACG’s Sector Marino and nearby exposed regions. Costa Rica is continuously attempting to construct more of these guarded regions that they can investigate and understand more about.

At the moment, there is a five-year program in the works that takes place from 2015-2019 that will document and classify the majority of marine macro organisms and microorganisms that are located within the ACG, and with will make the intelligence discovered accessible to the general population.

To date 594 have been classified in the ACG, that amounts to 15.5% of the recorded specimens on the Pacific shore of Costa Rica. Majority of the identified specimens are comprised of 32% crustaceans, while are 31% mollusks, and 8% are cnidarians. Compared to the other various regions on the Pacific front of Costa Rica, the ACG has less acknowledged marine specimens compared to other guarded regions of Costa Rica including Golfo Dulce, Isla del Coco, and Bahia Culebra. The compiling and reporting of specimens in a region is a vital measure in understanding and preserving the marine biodiversity in that region.

Despite all the investigations and expeditions to date there are still some considerable gaps in Costa Rica’s insight of taxonomy and geographic distribution of marine organisms in the ACG. A lot more effort is required to obtain a general perception of the inventory, ecological role of the species, their habitats, population structure, and distribution. Costa Rica has made considerable progress to date on researching these protected areas that surround the country. A way to indicate how well Costa Rica is doing at conserving and protecting their oceans and coasts is to monitor the number of projects and research studies they have put into marine diversity.

Currently there are six marine projects at work in Costa Rica. Overall both the subsidies and marine studies and projects indicate Costa Rica’s drive to sustain the environment and their oceans and coasts.