INBio

INBio is a scientific institution of Costa Rica. The acronym stands for Instituto Nacional de Biodiversidad, ("National Institute for Biodiversity"). Biodiversity is the variety of species within an ecosystem. One of the many things that makes INBio unique is the large insect collection that it has. It contains over 3 million specimens and tens of thousands of species all recorded in Atta, the computer database that contains all of the data such as exact location (including GPS coordinates), date of collection, name of the collector and method of collection.

INBio is a non-governmental, non-profit, public interest organization of civil society that works in close collaboration with different government institutions, universities, the private sector and other public and private organizations, both within and outside Costa Rica.¹

History

Costa Rica decided in 1989 that some sort of organization was necessary to study the biodiversity of Costa Rica. The government did not have the ability at the time to fund a new organization so a handful of scientists and entrepreneurs took the initiative and created the non-profit organization now known as INBio¹.

Structure

There are many different components to INBio such as Bio-prospecting, INBioparque, INBio editorial, and the many different research areas such as Arthropods, Fungi, and Plants. Bio-prospecting is the division dealing with finding useful products from the specimens collected. INBio has worked with companies such as Merck, Bristol Meyers Squib, and the University of Massachusetts.² INBioparque is a natural park resembling a sort of open are nearly cageless zoo in Santo Domingo, Heredia just a few miles north of downtown San Jose in Costa Rica. The research programs going on now vary from studying the Oonopidae family of spiders to compiling a book with all of the genera of known and described flies in central america. Such a project has never been done in a tropical place with such a large biodiversity.

Sources

1. "What is INBio?" Instituto Nacional de Biodiversidad. 13 Apr. 2007. .

2. Gámez, Rodrigo. "Algunos Resultados Del Trabajo Conjuto." Alianza INBio-SINAC. August, 2000.

External links

* [http://www.inbio.ac.cr/en/default.html INBio]