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chapter 17 Biodiversity Inventories in Costa Rica and Their Application to Conservation Paul Hanson Biodiversity inventorying and monitoring provide essential information used by many basic scientific disciplines as well as many applied sciences such as biotechnology, agriculture , fisheries, and conservation. Most inventorying and monitoring have involved organisms that are relatively well known taxonomically— for example, vertebrates and vascular plants. Yet the poorly known groups of organisms, such as invertebrates and fungi, constitute the majority of the species. Conservation decisions based on data for a limited range of organisms having relatively few species can be misleading (Prendergast et al. 1993). Moreover, poorly known groups of organisms tend to be smaller in size and to have shorter generation times, which means that they respond more rapidly to environmental changes (Brown 1991). Thus, taxonomically difficult organisms are often good indicators of environmental change and can help us to realize that a problem exists before the plants and vertebrates are affected. However, basic taxonomic research is needed before these poorly known groups of organisms can be used in monitoring and other conservation activities. The problem is that there are too few taxonomists working on the most species-rich groups of organisms (Gaston and May 1992; Hawksworth and Ritchie 1993; Hammond 1995). Worse yet, taxonomists who have a lifetime’s experience are retiring, and the knowledge they possess (much of it unpublished) is not being recovered through firsthand transfer to young recruits (Cotterill 1995). In recent years developed countries have begun reducing government expenditures, and thus funding of national museums has diminished markedly in real terms. Increasingly such institutions are expected to become more self-sufficient. This means that traditional taxonomic research now has to compete with more attractive proposals in evolutionary biology, the latter often addressing species/population level 229 questions in taxa that are already well known. Not surprisingly, job opportunities for taxonomists have fallen drastically, and graduate students choose financially more promising fields of research. Because the majority of species do not yet have scientific names and the process of describing new species is generally slow, an attractive alternative is a rapid biodiversity assessment of taxonomically well-known groups (Oliver and Beattie 1996). When such rapid assessments do include poorly known taxa, they must rely on the separation of morphospecies. Although time is saved by not having to obtain names for the species, if the sorting of morphospecies is done by a nonspecialist, it is prone to serious errors (for example, many insects can be separated only by dissecting male genitalia). Although rapid biodiversity assessments are relatively inexpensive, they are no substitute for the more costly systematic inventories. Moreover, species names are required for determining which sites harbor phylogenetically isolated species and for serving a wider community of users interested in environmental education, bioprospecting, and the like. In recent years a considerable amount of taxonomic inventory work has been carried out in Costa Rica in general and in dry forests in particular . Because the work done in the dry forests has occurred in a national context, and because the problems facing inventories do not differ fundamentally between terrestrial ecosystems, this chapter treats the broader national process. It thus differs from other chapters in this book by not focusing specifically on dry forests. This chapter briefly evaluates inventory work in Costa Rica by considering what some of the problems have been and how future inventories might be improved. Three aspects of the inventory process are discussed here: (1) the field operation of collecting specimens, (2) the resource base for biodiversity assessment, especially the biological collections and human resources available in the country, and (3) the information that is derived from the inventory, especially as it applies to conservation. COSTA RICAN INVENTORIES: THE FIELD OPERATION As in most countries, the early inventories in Costa Rica were quite sporadic (see Gómez and Savage 1983 for a brief history). Subsequent inventories, primarily by staff of the National Museum and the University of Costa Rica, have been primarily museum-based and driven by the motivation of a few individuals. With the creation of the National Biodiversity Institute (INBio) in 1989 there was for the first time a coordinated and institutionalized effort to survey the species present in the country. INBio is a private , nonprofit organization whose mission is to promote a greater consciousness of the value of biodiversity in order to conserve it and hence improve the quality of human life. INBio is not intended to be an institution...

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