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Acceptance Speech Daniel H. Janzen. BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award. Ecology and Conservation Biology

Dear BBVA Foundation and the panel of judges:

I am deeply honored and grateful to be the recipient of the 2011 BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Ecology and Conservation Biology.

I was most surprised and of course pleased to learn of this honor, and felt how very encouraging it is to know that there is a part of the scientific community that recognizes and approves of what we have been trying to do all these years in Costa Rica.

And on that point, I must immediately acknowledge that this award is truly in honor of the many hundreds of Costa Rican biodiversity managers, administrators and conservation biologists who have invested many decades in their many different ways of conducting conservation of their complex tropical ecosystems, and doing it transparently, as an example for the world. For me, all of this is "conservation by means of non-damaging biodiversity development", or more simply, biodevelopment.

A pillar of this conservation has been the restoration of damaged ecosystems - mostly by allowing them to restore themselves and by resident biodiversity caretakers helping it along.

A second pillar has been simultaneous empowerment of those same resident caretakers - also known as parataxonomists, the conservation area staff, and visiting biologists - to conduct the detailed inventories, natural history studies, and ecological experiments that yield the site-specific knowledge required to non-damagingly biodevelop a conserved wildland to where it can be tolerant of the human presence and footprints that yield benefits for society. A conserved wildland must at the least pay for its own bed and breakfast.

A third pillar has been DNA barcoding of the hundreds of thousands of species conserved, which in turn enables true bioliteracy for all concerned; this bioliteracy aims to allow anyone to identify any species at any place at any time for any purpose - in short, to be able to read wild biodiversity.

The BBVA Foundation award funds will be used to partly finance an endowment fund for the permanent leadership of the parataxonomists of Area de Conservacion Guanacaste, northwestern Costa Rica.

Again, I, my wife and partner Dr. Winnie Hallwachs, and 375,000 species of things, thank the BBVA Foundation and the panel of judges for this elegant support for conservation.

Si desea más información, puede ponerse en contacto con el

Departamento de Comunicación de la Fundación BBVA (91 374 52 10 y 91 537 37 69 ó ) o consultar en la web www.fbbva.es