Guanacaste is a province of Costa Rica located in the northwestern region of the country, along the coast of the Pacific Ocean. It is bordered by Nicaragua to the north, Alajuela Province to the east, and Puntarenas Province to the southeast. It is the most sparsely populated of all the provinces of Costa Rica. The province covers an area of 10,141 square kilometres (3,915 sq mi) and as of 2010, had a population of 354,154, with annual revenue of $2 billion.
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.
In the 19th century, Nicaragua was beset by political problems, allowing William Walker, an American Southerner seeking to establish English-speaking slavery states in Latin America, to ascend to the Nicaraguan presidency.
Guanacaste National Park, in Spanish Parque Nacional Guanacaste is a national park in northern Costa Rica. The park is part of the Area de Conservación Guanacaste World Heritage Site, and stretches from the slopes of the Orosí and Cacao volcanoes west to the Interamerican Highway where it is adjacent to the Santa Rosa National Park. It was created in 1989, partially due to the campaigning and fund-raising of Dr. Daniel Janzen to allow a corridor between the dry forest and rain forest areas which many species migrate between seasonally. The park covers an area of approximately 340 square kilometers, and includes 140 species of mammals, over 300 birds, 100 amphibians and reptiles, and over 10,000 species of insects that have been identified. It was this high density of bio-diversity that encouraged the Costa Rican government to protect this area. The Guanacaste National Park weaves the neighboring Santa Rosa National Park with the high altitude forests of the two volcanoes, Orosi and Cacao, and the rainforest of the Caribbean in the country's north.
The Area de Conservación Guanacaste is a network of protected areas and a World Heritage Site in Guanacaste Province, in northwestern Costa Rica. The World Heritage Site contains an unbroken tract of tropical dry forest and important habitat for several vulnerable species, including the Central American tapir, mangrove hummingbird, and the great green macaw. Over 7,000 plant species and 900 vertebrate species have been located in the park.
Las Baulas de Guanacaste Marine National Park is a National Park of Costa Rica and a Ramsar Site. The park is managed by the Tempisque Conservation Area, and covers approximately a 167.3 square kilometres (64.6 sq mi) marine area of the Tamarindo Bay, next to the town of Tamarindo. It supports the largest nesting colony of leatherback sea turtles on the Pacific coast of the Americas. Female leatherbacks often come ashore at Playa Grande between October and May to lay their eggs.
Guanacaste Conservation Area is an administrative area which is managed by the Sistema Nacional de Areas de Conservacion (SINAC) of Costa Rica for conservation in the northwestern part of Costa Rica. It contains three national parks, as well as wildlife refuges and other nature reserves. The area contains the Area de Conservación Guanacaste World Heritage Site, which comprises four areas.
Rincón de la Vieja National Park, is a National Park in Guanacaste Province of the northwestern part of Costa Rica.
Iguanita Wildlife Refuge is a wildlife refuge in the Guanacaste Conservation Area located in the Guanacaste Province of northwestern Costa Rica.
The Talamancan montane forests ecoregion, in the tropical moist broadleaf forest biome, are in montane Costa Rica and western Panama in Central America.
The Isthmian–Atlantic moist forests (NT0129) are a Central American tropical moist broadleaf forest ecoregion located on the lowland slopes on the Caribbean Sea side of Nicaragua and Costa Rica and the Gulf and Pacific Ocean sides of Panama. The forest species are a mix of North American and South American, as this region only became a land bridge in the past 3 million years.
Tortuguero National Park is a national park in the Limón Province of Costa Rica. It is situated within the Tortuguero Conservation Area of the northeastern part of the country. Despite its remote location, reachable only by airplane or boat, it is the third-most visited park in Costa Rica. The park has a large variety of biological diversity due to the existence within the reserve of eleven different habitats, including rainforest, mangrove forests, swamps, beaches, and lagoons. Located in a tropical climate, it is very humid, and receives up to 250 inches (6,400 mm) of rain a year.
The Central American dry forests ecoregion, of the tropical and subtropical dry broadleaf forests biome, is located in Central America.
The Costa Rican seasonal moist forests ecoregion covers the Pacific Slope of the volcanic mountain range of northwestern Costa Rica and the extreme south of Nicaragua. The area has a distinct dry season during which the characteristic deciduous trees drop their leaves. The forests themselves have been highly degraded in the past by human conversion to agriculture and settlement. The Costa Rican capital city of San Jose is in the middle of this ecoregion.
The Isthmian–Pacific moist forests ecoregion covers the lowland tropical evergreen forests on the Pacific side of the central mountains of southern Costa Rica and western Panama. As the meeting zone between North and South American floral communities, the area is one of very high biodiversity. Much of the rainforest has, however, been cleared for subsistence agriculture and cattle grazing.
The Moist Pacific Coast mangroves ecoregion covers a series of disconnected mangrove sites along the Pacific Ocean coast of Costa Rica and Panama. These sites occur mostly on coastal flatlands around lagoons, particularly where rivers from the inland mountains reach the sea, bringing fresh water to the coastal forests. The area is in a transition zone from the drier coastline to the north; rainfall in this ecoregions is over 2,000 mm/year, and reaches over 3,600 mm/year at the southern end.
The Rio Negro-Rio San Sun mangroves ecoregion covers a series of small of discontinuous mangrove forests on the Caribbean Sea coast of Costa Rica, from a small portion inside the border with Nicaragua in the west to the border with Panama in the east. The coast on this stretch is a flat, alluvial plain, and mangroves are only a small part of a diverse patchwork of local habitats including swamps, mixed rainforests, coastal lagoons, sea grass beds, and sandy beaches. Much of the territory is "blackwater river" in character - slow-moving channels in wooded swamps with water stained by decayed matter. These mangroves are periodically damaged by hurricanes, such as in 1988 from Hurricane Joan, but are able to regenerate.
Reforestation efforts are being made in Costa Rica to recondition its biodiversity and ecosystems that were affected by heavy deforestation in the 1900s.
