I want to explain this choice properly, because it wasn’t obvious.

The areas I seriously considered were Polyglots — translating WordPress into Spanish — and the Photo Directory. Translation is genuinely valuable and there’s always work available. But it’s also an area where thousands of Spanish speakers are already contributing, and my marginal addition would be small.

The Photo Directory was different. I ran searches for Costa Rican species and the results were thin. Broader searches for neotropical wildlife weren’t much better. There’s an enormous imbalance in what’s represented in free image libraries, and it maps closely onto who has cameras, time, and internet access. Temperate northern species are documented heavily. Tropical ones, much less — despite the tropics holding most of the planet’s biodiversity.

That imbalance is the kind of thing this course keeps circling back to. Technology doesn’t distribute itself evenly, and neither does the material that fills it. A gap in an image library sounds trivial until you’re a teacher in another country trying to show students what a bocaracá looks like, and every result you find is copyrighted.

I also had a practical advantage: I already go to these places. I don’t need to organize an expedition to photograph highland species — I can be at Cerro de la Muerte in a few hours. Being in the country you’re documenting turns out to be a significant head start.

So the plan is three regions, chosen by altitude rather than distance, because in Costa Rica elevation changes the species far more than kilometers do:

• Caribbean, 0–100 m — humid tropical forest, mangrove
• Pacific, 0–800 m — dry and transitional forest
• Highlands, 2,000–3,400 m — Dota, Cerro de la Muerte, Irazú

Target: 30 photographs, CC0, species identified wherever I can confirm the name.