Lepidoptera of Area De Conservación Guanacaste (ACG)
ACG is 115,000 hectares of interdigitated tropical dry forest, rain forest and cloud forest in northwestern Costa Rica (0-2000 m) (www.acguanacaste.ac.cr). The area is one of extraordinary biodiversity – there many be as many species of Lepidoptera in ACG as in North America. For the past 25 years, Dan Janzen and Winnie Hallwachs have led a major biodiversity inventory of this region (janzen.sas.upenn.edu). Particular effort has been directed towards Lepidoptera and their parasitoids. More than 20 parataxonomists, Costa Rica’s INBio, and an international community of taxonomic specialists have conducted the work, funded mostly by ACG and the US NSF Biotic Surveys and Inventories. As a result of this long effort, there is an unrivalled understanding of food plant use, microgeographic distributions, parasitoids, and abundance of an estimated 9600 species of Lepidoptera larger than leaf miners. Efforts to gather DNA barcodes for all the Lepidoptera of ACG began in earnest in late 2004. Since then, more than 10,000 barcode records have been obtained from more than 1000 species.
Checklist
Please click here to see the species Checklist for this campaign.
Barcoding Summary
Please click here to see the current barcoding results, and the image library for this campaign
Campaign Contacts
| Co-Chairs: | Dan Janzen, Winnie Hallwachs |
| Campaign Manager: | Mehrdad Hajibabaei |
| Collections: |
Instituto Nacional de Biodiversidad, Costa Rica (INBio) National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution American Museum of Natural History, New York University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia The Natural History Museum (London) McGuire Center for Lepidoptera and Biodiversity, University of Florida |
| Taxonomic Experts: | John Burns - Hesperiidae, Jean-Marie Cadiou - Sphingidae, Ian Kitching - Sphingidae, Claude Lemaire (deceased) - Saturniidae |
| DNA Analysis & Database: | Biodiversity Institute of Ontario |