Costa Rica is located on the Central American Isthmus, surrounding the point 10° north of the equator and 84° west of the prime meridian. It has 212 km of Caribbean Sea coastline and 1,016 on the North Pacific Ocean.
Cartago is the head city of Cartago canton of the Cartago Province, and is composed of the Oriental and Occidental districts as stated in the administrative divisions of Costa Rica. It was the capital of Costa Rica from 1574 to 1824.
The University of Costa Rica is a public university in the Republic of Costa Rica, in Central America. Its main campus, Ciudad Universitaria Rodrigo Facio, is located in San Pedro Montes de Oca, in the province of San José. It is the oldest and largest institution of higher learning in Costa Rica, originally established as the Universidad de Santo Tomás in 1843. It is also the most important research university in the country and Central America and is counted among the most prestigious universities of Latin America. Approximately 45,000 students attend UCR throughout the year.
Daniel Hunt Janzen is an American evolutionary ecologist, and conservationist. He divides his time between his professorship in biology at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is the DiMaura Professor of Conservation Biology, and his research and field work in Costa Rica.
The wildlife of Costa Rica comprises all naturally occurring animals, fungi and plants that reside in this Central American country. Costa Rica supports an enormous variety of wildlife, due in large part to its geographic position between North and South America, its neotropical climate, and its wide variety of habitats. Costa Rica is home to more than 500,000 species, which represent nearly 5% of the species estimated worldwide, making Costa Rica one of the 20 countries with the highest biodiversity in the world. Of these 500,000 species, a little more than 300,000 are insects.
The Ministry of Environment and Energy is a ministry or department of the government of Costa Rica.
The Inter-American Biodiversity Information Network (IABIN) is a network dedicated to the adoption and promotion of ecoinformatics standards and protocols in all the countries of the Americas, thus facilitating the sound use of biological information for conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity. It is primarily an inter-governmental initiative but has a strong participation of a wide range of non-governmental partners.
Alberto Cañas Escalante was a politician, writer, intellectual, public servant, and journalist from San José, Costa Rica. He is known as one of the most important figures in the cultural, political, and social life of Costa Rica during the latter half of the twentieth century. The National Library System of Costa Rica credits Cañas with more than 4,773 publications as of 2005.
Costa Rican literature has roots in colonization and is marked by European influences. Because Costa Rica is a young country, its literary tradition is also young. The history of Costa Rican literature dates to the end of the 19th century.
Alfio Piva Mesén is a Costa Rican politician, veterinarian, scientist and environmentalist. He was the First Vice President of Costa Rica from 2010 to 2014. The Second Vice President during that interval was Luis Liberman.
Parataxonomy is a system of labor division for use in biodiversity research, in which the rough sorting tasks of specimen collection, field identification, documentation and preservation are conducted by primarily local, less specialized individuals, thereby alleviating the workload for the "alpha" or "master" taxonomist. Parataxonomy may be used to improve taxonomic efficiency by enabling more expert taxonomists to restrict their activity to the tasks that require their specialist knowledge and skills, which has the potential to expedite the rate at which new taxa may be described and existing taxa may be sorted and discussed. Parataxonomists generally work in the field, sorting collected samples into recognizable taxonomic units (RTUs) based on easily recognized features. The process can be used alone for rapid assessment of biodiversity.
The La Amistad International Park, or in Spanish Parque Internacional La Amistad, formerly the La Amistad National Park, is a Transboundary Protected Area in Latin America, management of which is shared between Costa Rica and Panama, following a recommendation by UNESCO after the park's inclusion in the World Heritage Site list in 1983. The park and surrounding biosphere reserve is one of the most outstanding conservation areas in Central America, preserving a major tract of tropical forest wilderness. It is world-renowned for its extraordinary biodiversity and endemism.
Guido Miranda Gutiérrez was a Costa Rican civil servant and medical doctor. Miranda is credited with spearheading the effort to push the Costa Rican Department of Social Insurance from the capital of San José into smaller municipalities and rural regions.
Symmerista inbioi is a moth in the family Notodontidae first described by Isidro A. Chacón in 2014. It has been collected between 1,250 and 2,700 meters in highland cloud forests of the Cordillera de Talamanca in Costa Rica.
Emilia Prieto Tugores was a graphic artist, educator, singer, composer, and scholar of folklore from the Central Valley of Costa Rica, one of the few women to enter the field of artistic satire in the first half of the 20th century. Her work was recognized with a Joaquín Monge Prize for cultural periodism in the 1984. Studying her native folklore, Prieto's collection of songs "influenced [a] generation of troubadours". The Nacional de Patrimonio Cultural Inmaterial Emilia Prieto Tugores was named for her, and awarded for the first time, in 2015.
María Eugenia Bozzoli is a Costa Rican anthropologist, sociologist and human rights activist. She is one of the founders of anthropology in Costa Rica, as well as the country's first woman anthropologist.
Lola Fernández in Colombia is a leading Costa Rican teacher and abstract painter.
Although the conservation movement developed in Europe in the 18th century, Costa Rica as a country has been heralded its champion in the current times. Costa Rica hosts an astonishing number of species, given its size, having more animal and plant species than the US and Canada combined while being only 250 miles long and 150 miles wide. A widely accepted theory for the origin of this unusual density of species is the free mixing of species from both North and South America occurring on this "inter-oceanic" and "inter-continental" landscape. Preserving the natural environment of this fragile landscape, therefore, has drawn the attention of many international scholars.
Julieta Dobles Yzaguirre is a Costa Rican poet, writer, and educator. She is a five-time winner of the Aquileo J. Echeverría Award and received the Magón National Prize for Culture in 2013.
Winifred Hallwachs is an American tropical ecologist who helped to establish and expand northwestern Costa Rica's Área de Conservación Guanacaste (ACG). The work of Hallwachs and her husband Daniel Janzen at ACG is considered an exemplar of inclusive conservation.
