2. Pacific Region

Fabio Buitrago (England, 1974). He completed his basic studies at the Colegio Centroamérica in Managua. During his last years of high school, he was an assistant to Father Ignacio Astorqui, who influenced him to enroll in the Ecology and Natural Resources program offered by the Central American University (UCA). His curiosity for underwater resources began when his father José Ángel Buitrago, who in the early 1970s was part of an international group of divers exploring the country’s lakes and oceans, took him below the surface of the Xiloá lagoon when he was just six years old. Since then, his passion for learning more, exploring, and learning about the fish and other underwater organisms that inhabit the country was awakened. By the age of 12, he would often dive with scuba gear in swimming pools, often accompanied by his inseparable friend Armando Ubeda, with whom he would later carry out multiple dives, explorations, and research of the national marine heritage. He obtained his first diving certification in 1990, when he was in his penultimate year of high school. In 1992, upon entering the Ecology and Natural Resources program at UCA, he was immediately recruited by Dr. Ken McKaye who was conducting research on the native cichlids of Xiloá, Apoyo lagoons and Lake Cocibolca, serving as a research assistant and underwater cameraman, making hundreds of morphometric measurements of different fish species. His professional dream was to study the migration of bull sharks in Lake Cocibolca, however, upon finishing his degree, he had the opportunity to work in Río San Juan for the organization Friends of the Earth Spain, studying the populations of alligators and crocodiles in the Los Guatuzos wetlands, work that was his degree thesis and which projected him to receive a scholarship from the German Academic Exchange Service to study a master’s degree in Wildlife Management and Conservation at the National University of Costa Rica. His master’s thesis consisted of the national census of crocodiles in Nicaragua.Upon returning from Costa Rica, he led multiple research processes from the Friends of San Juan River Foundation, which he helped to establish and consolidate in previous years. Among the most important processes are biodiversity inventories, scientific expeditions to the Indio Maíz biological reserve, more than 15 management plans for various protected areas throughout the country, and the proposal to declare the San Juan River as a Biosphere Reserve. Along with his teacher Gustavo Adolfo Ruiz, he systemized his wealth of experience and research systematized this wealth of experience and research that was published in the first book of herpetofauna (reptiles and amphibians) of Nicaragua in 2003.In 2005, he returned to work in the conservation of marine areas, as the national director of the Coastal Zones Project, which promoted public-private partnerships for the comprehensive and shared management of the Chacocente Wildlife Refuge. During his tenure in the coastal zones project, he carried out several dives in the Pacific Ocean and began the process of identifying and describing corals, tunicates, sponges, fish, and other organisms submerged in the Pacific of Nicaragua. Since then, despite having worked on projects not related to the sea, he never stopped deepening his knowledge about the country’s marine natural resources. In 2010, while working for German cooperation, he started the environmental education project called Wild Nicaragua, which produced more than 110 documentary programs on national biodiversity, presented weekly on the Vos TV channel. He was one of the main researchers of the corals of the Pacific of Nicaragua, leading the proposal for the creation of the Anciana Marine Sanctuary until its declaration as a municipal part in 2012; he was also a precursor to the proposal for the creation of the coral corridor in the southern Pacific of Nicaragua.In 2008, he became a professional diver and has taught thousands of Nicaraguans to dive. In 2016, thanks to the support and teachings of Andy Phillips (Utila Dive Center), he became the first PADI Course Director in Nicaragua, training hundreds of national and international diving instructors, which has undoubtedly energized the diving industry in the country. Between 2012 and 2018, he participated as an ecologist and diving professional in the establishment of multiple artificial reefs, both in the Pacific and the Caribbean, and carried out studies on the ecological colonization processes of these structures. In 2016, commissioned by the Humboldt Center, he conducted a characterization study of the marine ecosystems of the municipality of Corn Island along with Peltier Barahona. The study served as a basis for the subsequent declaration of this municipality as a protected marine landscape.During the years 2016 and 2017, he designed the Submerged Natural Heritage Museum “Blue Nicaragua.” The museum’s inauguration, scheduled for April 2018, had to be postponed due to the socio-political crisis that erupted in the country. After 2018, he directed the operations of the British organization Fauna and Flora International in Nicaragua, with which he developed a marine conservation program and enhanced the organization’s work on sea turtle conservation. In 2020, he moved to Roatán, Honduras, where he works as a diving instructor trainer. At the same time, he takes part in the process of restoring coral reefs, learning techniques of reproduction, growth maintenance, disease treatment, and monitoring of different Caribbean coral species. During his stay in Roatán, he wrote the PADI “Lionfish Control” course, which is massively taught throughout the Caribbean so that recreational divers can help contain the lionfish invasion.In 2022, he received Fulbright scholarship to study a PhD in Marine Ecology at Boston University to carry out his doctoral studies with a research proposal linked to the ecology of coral reefs of the Central American Caribbean Sea and their relationship with the fisheries of different species.