Liliana Madrigal (born March 23, 1957) is a conservationist who has worked toward the protection of rainforests and indigenous cultures in both Central America and South America. She is the co-founder and Senior Director of Program Operations of the Amazon Conservation Team (ACT), where she is chief liaison to in-country programs and communities. Her primary focuses are the indigenous peoples and forests of the northwest Amazon (including the Inga, Kamsa and Cofán peoples) and the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta (the Kogi people).
Madrigal grew up in Costa Rica and moved to Southern California in 1968. She attended the University of California, Los Angeles on scholarship where she received a Bachelor of Arts in Generative Linguistics. She currently lives in the Washington, D.C. area with her husband, ethnobotanist Dr. Mark Plotkin. [1]
Madrigal began her career in conservation working under Spencer Beebe for The Nature Conservancy (TNC). She became director of TNC's Costa Rica program and worked with the National Parks Foundation of Costa Rica where she helped establish and manage some of Costa Rica's most renowned parks - notably, Manuel Antonio National Park. [2] She later left TNC to become a founding member of Conservation International (CI) where she was director of the Costa Rica and Panama programs. [3]
In 1996, Madrigal co-founded the Amazon Conservation Team (ACT) with Dr. Mark Plotkin. Both Madrigal and Plotkin felt that partnering closely with indigenous colleagues to protect indigenous lands represented an extraordinary conservation opportunity. Today, Madrigal oversees all program initiatives executed by ACT. She frequently visits South America to work with ACT's staff, indigenous colleagues, and partners. Madrigal focuses most heavily on Colombia where she played a vital role in the establishment of UMIYAC, the Union of Yagé Healers of Colombia. Madrigal also oversees some aspects of ACT-supported efforts in both Brazil and Suriname. She takes special interest in advancing human rights of women throughout Amazonia and drives several of ACT's women's projects. [4]
Thomas Eugene Lovejoy III was an American ecologist who was President of the Amazon Biodiversity Center, a Senior Fellow at the United Nations Foundation and a university professor in the Environmental Science and Policy department at George Mason University. Lovejoy was the World Bank's chief biodiversity advisor and the lead specialist for environment for Latin America and the Caribbean as well as senior advisor to the president of the United Nations Foundation. In 2008, he also was the first Biodiversity Chair of the H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics and the Environment to 2013. Previously he served as president of the Heinz Center since May 2002. Lovejoy introduced the term biological diversity to the scientific community in 1980. He was a past chair of the Scientific Technical Advisory Panel (STAP) for the Global Environment Facility (GEF), the multibillion-dollar funding mechanism for developing countries in support of their obligations under international environmental conventions.
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Richard Evans Schultes was an American biologist, considered to be the father of modern ethnobotany. He is known for his studies of the uses of plants by indigenous peoples, especially the indigenous peoples of the Americas. He worked on entheogenic or hallucinogenic plants, particularly in Mexico and the Amazon, involving lifelong collaborations with chemists. He had charismatic influence as an educator at Harvard University; several of his students and colleagues went on to write popular books and assume influential positions in museums, botanical gardens, and popular culture.
Mark J. Plotkin is an ethnobotanist and a plant explorer in the Neotropics, where he is an expert on rainforest ecosystems. Plotkin is an advocate for tropical rainforest conservation and host of Plants of the Gods: Hallucinogens, Healing, Culture and Conservation podcast.
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Sally R. Osberg an American business executive who formerly served as president and CEO of the Skoll Foundation, where she partnered with founder and chairman, Jeffrey Skoll. She was the founding executive director of the Children's Discovery Museum of San Jose.
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TheSloth Conservation Foundation (SloCo) is a non-profit organisation based in Costa Rica that is dedicated to the protection of sloths living in wild and human-modified habitats through research, education and community-based conservation. SloCo was founded in 2017 by sloth researcher Dr. Rebecca Cliffe.
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