The Rincon Rainforest is a 5,600 hectare forest situated in the Area de Conservacion Guanacaste (ACG) in northwestern Costa Rica. And it’s been saved! Through the efforts of GDFCF, run by Dan and Winnie Janzen and the donations from individuals and organisations like CTF, the land has been purchased from its owners and saved forever.
The new target is now north of the Rincon Rainforest, and it’s called Sector A. Hot the tags at the bottom of this post for Sector A information.
The Rincon Forest conservation is a real success story for land purchase operations and CTF is proud to have supported the GDFCF with funds for many years. The best place to read the story and history of the Rincon Rainforest work is on the pages of the GDFCF website, a fantastic repository of rainforest information.
What is the Area de Conservacion Guanacaste (ACG)?
The ACG is 110,000 terrestrial hectares and 43,000 marine hectares of permanently conserved government-owned wildlands in northwestern Costa Rica. It began in 1971 as the 10,400 ha Parque Nacional Santa Rosa, a national monument and tropical dry forest national park. This conservation unit began to expand in 1986 to restore and conserve an entire tropical dry forest ecosystem. Today the ACG is a single biophysical unit about 90 km long, stretching from 17 km out in the Pacific Ocean to the east in the foothills of the Caribbean coastal plains. It contains about 235,000 species in its dry forest, cloud forest and rain forest, and the intergrades between these major ecosystems. This is roughly 2.4% of the world’s terrestrial biodiversity, or 60% of the species that occur in Costa Rica. It is also more species than occur in the continental USA. The ACG was decreed a UNESCO World Heritage Site (WHS) on 2 December 1999, and the definition is written such that any additions to it are automatically part WHS.
The ACG links the highlands of Costa Rica, the established Reserve of Santa Rosa in the Pacific lowlands with the National Parks of Guanacaste and Rincon de la Vieja. This provides a continuous bridge or corridor of forest from the Pacific lowland dry gallery forest to the highland cloud forests.
Such a corridor is considered vitally important in this narrow neck of Central America both for long distance bird immigrants, and for altitudinal migration of birds, mammals and insects.
The original area of forest denoted as the Rincon Rainforest has now been saved thanks the donations from around the world from individuals and organisations alike. However, north of the Rincon Rainforest is an area designated as Sector A. Sector A is now the target for GDFCF, click the Sector A tag below this post or in the tag cloud on the right.
A quote from Dan Janzen, the President of GDFCF…
We are the Guanacaste Dry Forest Conservation Fund (I am the President, my wife Dr. Winnie Hallwachs is the secretary and treasurer, and it is a US registered 501.c.3 It is also a registered NGO in Costa Rica, the NGO for Area de Conservacion Guanacaste (163,000 ha, 2% of Costa Rica; 2.6% of the world’s species, and real conservation into perpetuity). GDFCF currently owns 13,000 ha of ACG forest all purchased with donations, and all eventually to be given to the government, but currently simply managed by the government (by the ACG staff). The project is to obtain all the forest portions remaining around the margins of ACG, to make it as large and climate-robust as humanly possible, and endow all of the ACG (which currently has only an endowment of $6 m but we are working on it).