RES Guest Lecture: Insect conservation, monitoring and community science on Costa Rica’s Osa Peninsula
17 November @ 15:00 – 18:00
Free to attend – Booking is essential. Register here.
Eight Thousand Specimens, Seven Hundred Acres of Rainforest Protected.
Insect conservation, monitoring and community science on Costa Rica’s Osa Peninsula.
Get ready for the first of many talks forming our new Guest Lecture series at the new RES library and office space.
The talk will be followed by networking, drinks and nibbles and tours of the library and HQ.
Speaker: Jim Córdoba-Alfaro, with an intro from George McGavin
Date: 17 November 2026
Time: 15:00-18:00 (GMT)
Location: RES Library & HQ – 24 Wenlock Road, London, N1 7TA
Talk Summary
Somewhere in a museum drawer in Costa Rica sits a butterfly, Actinote lapita, that may no longer exist in the wild. Nobody can say when it disappeared, or why, because nobody was monitoring it – and that is the ordinary condition of tropical insects. They face the steepest conservation pressures of any group on Earth and generate the least evidence to act on.
Jim Córdoba-Alfaro describes twenty-five years of work to change that on Costa Rica’s Osa Peninsula, a landscape holding an estimated 3% of global biodiversity. A biological collection begun at the age of nine became the Insectopia Discovery Center, the region’s first natural history museum and reference collection, now holding over 8,000 specimens; along the way came the description of more than thirty species new to science, and the founding of two conservation organisations that today protect some 700 acres of private reserve, including the Río Nuevo field station.
The talk sets out what daily protection actually involves – patrols, permanence, payments for ecosystem services, and the slow business of establishing private protected areas – alongside the monitoring programme now running across the reserves, from collections and camera traps to bioacoustics.
It closes on community science: why the northern recording model transfers poorly to the tropics, where the real barriers lie, and why the schemes that work in rural Costa Rica are the ones built on livelihood rather than leisure.
About the Speaker
Jim Córdoba-Alfaro is a field entomologist, taxonomist and conservationist based on the Osa Peninsula, Costa Rica.
He is the Founder and President of the BioSur Foundation, a Costa Rican conservation organisation, and of Lands for Biological Diversity, its partner charity in the United States.
Through them, he has established some 700 acres of privately protected tropical forest, among them the Río Nuevo Reserve, a working field station with more than seven kilometres of trails that hosts researchers, students and visitors on the peninsula.
He is also the founder and director of the Insectopia Discovery Center, the first natural history museum in the Osa region and home to its biological collections, and a graduate of the Community Solutions Program of IREX and the U.S. Department of State.
Click here to read more about Jim
Jim began his biological collection at the age of nine, the same year he became a volunteer at the National Museum of Costa Rica, where he later oversaw the digitisation and curation of specimens in the Zoology collections. He first travelled to the Osa Peninsula at fourteen to study its entomofauna and settled there permanently in 2008. He has since described more than thirty species new to science, chiefly butterflies and beetles, and is a co-author of the description of the false click beetle genus Absensiugum in Insecta Mundi, of the first record of the rufous tree rat Diplomys labilis for Costa Rica in Check List, and of studies on the immature stages and cryptic variation of Morpho amathonte on the country’s South Pacific coast. He is a co-author of Animals of Costa Rica, the first comprehensive digital field guide to the country’s fauna, and the curator of a collection of more than eight thousand specimens.
Widely regarded as an engaging field teacher and guide, Jim speaks regularly to audiences about insects, tropical ecology, taxonomy and rainforest conservation, and has worked with international partners including Backroads, YETI and Brave Wilderness to bring the science of the Osa Peninsula to tens of millions of viewers. His fieldwork has taken him from the lowland rainforests of Corcovado National Park to the cloud forests of the Talamanca range, and his collections and photographs have been drawn on by museums, universities and research teams across the Neotropics. He is a recipient of Costa Rica’s Premio Nacional de Juventud Jorge Debravo. A keen macro-photographer, he continues to document the small and unnamed inhabitants of the forests he protects, and hopes those forests will outlast him.
Introduction from George McGavin
Dr George McGavin Hon.FRES is a well-known scientist and presenter in the UK, and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Entomological Society.
He is an Honorary Research Associate at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History and a Research Associate of The Department of Zoology of Oxford University. He is also a Fellow of the Linnean Society, The Royal Geographical Society and an Honorary Fellow of The Society of Biology. His research has taken him from the tropical forests of Papua New Guinea to the caves of Thailand and from the jungles of Belize to the savannas of Tanzania.
Click here to read more about Gavin
Dr McGavin studied Zoology at Edinburgh University before completing a doctorate at the British Museum of Natural History and Imperial College, London. George has written numerous books on insects and other animals. Widely acknowledged as an engaging and entertaining speaker George regularly speaks to audiences about insects, ecology, evolution, conservation and exploration. He is the presenter of Oak Tree: Nature’s Greatest Survivor for BBC4 and The Secret Life of Your House for ITV. Dr McGavin is also the presenter of the multi award winning After Life – The Science of Decay for BBC4. He is also an accomplished broadcaster having made many programmes for the BBC including the phenomenally successful ‘Lost Lands’ expedition series.
Dr McGavin is also a regular contributor to The One Show (BBC1) and recently presented the BBC Radio 4 programme The Etymology of Entomology. He has brought the science and fascination of entomology to millions of people in the UK and beyond and has several insect species named in his honour and hopes they survive him.
