Juliane Margaret Beate Koepcke (born 10 October 1954), is a German-Peruvian mammalogist who specialises in bats.

She is the daughter of German zoologists Maria and Hans-Wilhelm Koepcke and sole survivor of the 1971 LANSA Flight 508 crash.

When the plane was struck by lightning, she fell 3,000 m (10,000 ft) while strapped to her seat and suffered numerous injuries including a concussion, broken collarbone, and a torn knee ligament.

At the age of 14, she left Lima with her parents to establish the Panguana research station in the Amazon rainforest, where she learned survival skills.

Educational authorities disapproved and she was required to return to the Deutsche Schule Lima Alexander von Humboldt to take her exams, graduating on 23 December 1971.

Koepcke's father, Hans-Wilhelm, urged his wife to avoid flying with the airline due to its poor reputation.

[7] She received a doctorate from Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and returned to Peru to conduct research in mammalogy, specialising in bats.

[3] Koepcke's autobiography Als ich vom Himmel fiel: Wie mir der Dschungel mein Leben zurückgab (German for When I Fell from the Sky: How the Jungle Gave Me My Life Back) was released in 2011 by Piper Verlag.

[12] Koepcke's survival has been the subject of numerous books and films, including the low-budget and heavily fictionalized I miracoli accadono ancora (1974) by Italian filmmaker Giuseppe Maria Scotese, which was released in English as Miracles Still Happen and is sometimes called The Story of Juliane Koepcke.

Herzog was interested in telling her story because of a personal connection: He was scheduled to be on the same flight while scouting locations for his film Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), but a last-minute change of plans spared him from the crash.