Jukofsky, Diane

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JUKOFSKY, Diane

PERSONAL: Female. Education: Mount Holyoke College, B.A.

ADDRESSES: Office—Rainforest Alliance, 665 Broadway, Ste. 500, New York, NY 10012.

CAREER: Previous positions include press secretary to U.S. Representative Sam Gejdenson; editor of magazine for Minneapolis-St. Paul public television; lobbyist and editor for Minnesota Conservation Federation; and public information officer for National Wildlife Federation; Prentice Hall, New York, NY, former reporter; Scientists' Institute for Public Information, former vice president; Rainforest Alliance, New York, NY, director of communications and education, 2002–, director of Conservation Media Center in San Jose, Costa Rica. Teaches an online course on neotropical rainforests for New School University, New York, NY. Board member of World Teach-Costa Rica.

MEMBER: Society of Environmental Journalists, National Association of Science Writers, Sigma Xi (honorary).

WRITINGS:

Encyclopedia of Rainforests, Oryx Press (Westport, CT), 2001.

Also editor of bilingual Web site Eco-Index; contributor to periodicals, including National Wildlife, Popular Science, Wildlife Conservation, Equinox, American Scientist, American Forests, Journal of Forestry, and Nature Conservancy.

SIDELIGHTS: Diane Jukofsky has spent many years writing on environmental issues and is now the director of the communications divisions of the Rainforest Alliance. She has produced that organization's newsletter and arranged training workshops for American and Latin-American journalists and nongovernmental agencies. Jukofsky's Eco-Index is a bilingual online resource that provides information on Mexican and Central American conservation projects (with Brazilian project descriptions also provided in Portuguese), and includes a monthly magazine. In addition, Jukofsky helped launch several Costa Rica-based projects of the Rainforest Alliance, including its Conservation Media Center.

In her Encyclopedia of Rainforests Jukofsky pays particular attention to tropical plants and animals that face extinction. In the opening chapter, the author describes the tropical forests where such plants and animals are found, the reasons for tropical deforestation, and how the biome functions as an ecosystem. Each country considered is included in a chart that notes the reduction of its forests between 1980 and 1995. In the first of five sections, more than eight hundred species of amphibians, reptiles, arachnids, birds, mammals, insects, and fish are studied. In the second section Jukofsky covers 261 plant families; and in the third she concentrates on thirty-two tribes of indigenous people who live in these regions, including the threats to their survival. This section also contains short biographies of fifty-four scientists, activists, and explorers who have influenced understanding of the tropical forests. Finally, section four considers methods for saving the forests, and the last section lists resources, including Web sites. A Booklist contributor felt that "the major value of this book is that it collects and organizes some of the significant rain forest species, people, and resources in one volume and then points the way for finding more information."