DISCOVERING DIFFERENCE AND VARIABILITY IN BIODIVERSITY IN JALOVA, TORTUGUERO NATIONAL PARK, COSTA RICA. GVI 2021

For being a small country, Costa Rica contains enormous amounts of biodiversity and protected
area. Only covering 0.03% of the earths surface, Costa Rica (Middle America) is one of the 36
global hotspots for biodiversity. When looking at biodiversity, Costa Rica ranks 20th for the
highest richness and biodiversity globally (Mittermeier et al., 2004). Contrary to the country’s
small size of 51,042 square kilometres (Jiménez, 1995; Ministerio del Ambiente y Energía,
2000), it supports almost 4% of the world’s biodiversity (Nielson-Munroz et al. 2012). Over 900
species of birds (Garrigues and Dean 2007), nearly 400 species of amphibian and reptiles
(Leenders 2001) and at least 240 mammal species (Wainwright and Arias 2007) are found in
Costa Rica. However, many more species of flora and fauna have yet been discovered, and it is
believed that we are only breaking the surface when looking at the total amount of species in
Costa Rica (SINAC 2009).
North America and South America is connected by a natural geological land bridge which
includes, but not limited to, Costa Rica (Baltensperger & Brown 2015). With a wide range of
biological niches and ecoregions, this area of land (including Costa Rica) contains a multitude of
habitat types, explaining the high biodiversity found in this region (Stiles and Skutch 1989;
Garrigues and Dean 2007). With such a balanced and complex ecosystem, invasive species are a
huge threat to biodiversity, and with the inevitable threat of introducing invasive species, a cascade
effect would lead to a detrimental effect on biodiversity, abundance, and species richness (Roy et
al 2014).

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