Winnie D. Hallwachs

Winifred Hallwachs (born October 11, 1954) is an American tropical ecologist who helped to establish and expand northwestern Costa Rica's Área de Conservación Guanacaste (ACG).

Beginning in 1985, Hallwachs and Janzen revised their work to include the restoration, expansion, and conservation of tropical dry forest through biodiversity development. They helped found the Instituto Nacional de Biodiversidad (INBio) in 1989, and promoted the creation of public-private partnerships such as the Merck-INBio Agreement. Hallwachs and Janzen founded the Guanacaste Dry Forest Conservation Fund (GDFCF) in 1997, with a BA in biochemistry. After Princeton, Hallwachs spent a year in Sweden. Her first trip to the tropics was to visit her sister in the Peace Corps in the Central African Republic.

Hallwachs returned to Philadelphia, where she enrolled in Daniel Janzen's "Habitat and Organisms" course at the University of Pennsylvania. The class addressed the natural history of tropical animal-plant interactions often drawing from Janzen's research in Guanacaste, a province in northwestern Costa Rica. Hallwachs joined Janzen as a volunteer on his next trip to Costa Rica. She has collaborated with him since 1978.

To meet the needs of their biodiversity development initiatives, Hallwachs deferred completion of her PhD for a number of years.

Biodiversity development work In 1985, realizing that widespread development in northwestern Costa Rica was rapidly decimating the forest in which they conducted their research, Hallwachs and Janzen expanded the focus of their work. Their goal was to achieve tropical forest restoration, expansion (through land purchases) and conservation, while continuing their scientific research at a reduced level.

Although Janzen has often received more attention, as the outgoing spokesperson of the team, he emphasizes that their contributions are equal. Biodiversity Development (1985–present) Parataxonomist Program (1985–present) Hallwachs and Janzen have donated most of the award money that they have received to the expansion and maintenance of the ACG. The resulting national park connects habitats from the tops of volcanoes to the sea, including mid-elevation Caribbean rainforest as well as neotropical dry forest. In 1999, ACG was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Hebert focused on a section of 650 base pairs in the DNA sequence of the mitochondrial cytochrome c oxidase subunit I (COI) gene.

Hallwachs and Janzen support initiatives to gather DNA barcodes for all of the species in the world, through CBOL (Consortium for the Barcode of Life) and iBOL (International Barcode of Life).

Educational initiatives Hallwachs and Janzen have been active in training North American tropical biologists. In 1965, Janzen designed an eight-week course for the Organization for Tropical Studies that has been taken by the majority of North American graduate students in tropical biology, and continues to be taught. During their class, students are hosted at ACG.

In addition, they are deeply involved in the training and employment of Costa Ricans as field researchers. In an intentional initiative to redress gender imbalance, this has included the training and employment of women. Some women work with a husband as a partner, while others work independently.

In November 2017, Hallwachs gave the keynote address "Conservation, Onychorhynchus, and Female Parataxonomists" at the XXI Congress for the Mesoamerican Society for Biology and Conservation. She emphasized the importance of women working as parataxonomists.

Insect species named in honor of Hallwachs Enicospilus hallwachsae (Ichneumonidae), Gauld, 1988. Paradirphia winifredae (Saturniidae), Lemaire & Wolfe, 1988. Barcoding results show that this has split into at least 5 species. Euhapigiodes hallwachsae (Notodontidae), Franclemont & J.S. Miller, 1997. Euhapigiodes hallwachsae turned out to be a synonym of Hapigiodes vazquezae, and the name was retracted. Omiodes hallwachsae (Crambidae), Gentili & Solis, 1998. Nemoria winniae (Geometridae) Pitkin, 1993. Eacles imperialis hallwachsae (Saturniidae), Brechlin & Meister, 2011. Lathecla winnie (Lycaenidae), Robbins & Busby, 2015.

Awards 1993, Award for Improvement of Costa Rican Quality of Life, Universidad de Costa Rica (co award with D. Janzen). 2003, Award to Guanacaste Dry Forest Conservation Fund, Wege Foundation (co award with D. Janzen) 2006, Winner, National Outdoor Book Awards (NOBA), for 100 Caterpillars: Portraits from the Tropical Forests of Costa Rica (2006), Design & Artistic Merit Category.

Selected works Books co-authored 264 pp. 256 pp.

Book chapters

Scientific publications 46 pp.