McGuire Center presents public lecture by renowned ecologist

September 23, 2005

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — UF’s Florida Museum of Natural History’s McGuire Center for Lepidoptera and Biodiversity will sponsor a free public lecture at 2 p.m. Sunday in the Reitz Student Union auditorium by world-renowned ecologist Daniel Janzen.

Janzen, the University of Pennsylvania DiMaura professor of conservation biology, will discuss “Conservation, caterpillar inventory and DNA barcoding of a large complex tropical wildland.” The lecture is free and open to the public.

Janzen has 50 years of experience as a tropical ecologist with an emphasis on preservation and biodiversity. With more than 400 publications on the subjects, he is considered an expert in the fields of tropical science administration and conservation biology. Janzen has received many awards throughout his career, including the first Crafoord Prize in biology by the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences (1984), the Kyoto Prize in Basic Biology (1997), and the John Scott Award of the City of Philadelphia for activities good for humankind (2003).

A member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, his activities have had a positive influence on society’s awareness of the relevance and potential of conservation of tropical wildland biodiversity for global understanding, national sustainable development, and individual quality of life, both inside and outside of the tropics.

His current focus is caterpillar biodiversity, the combination of conservation and biodiversity development, and facilitating global bioliteracy through the emergence of the ability of all people to be able to identify any organism through DNA barcoding.