Eco-information a key-touch away

By A. Asohan and N. Shashi Kala 

LIKE research and development institutes, organizations dedicated to saving the environment deal with enormous amounts of information, which they need to store, process and distribute.

Take the Asian Wetland Bureau (AWB) for instance, which started as the WWF-funded INTER-WADER in 1984.

Initially, it was set up to study shorebirds. In 1987 however, it changed its name and expanded its scope to include the study of wetlands — swamps, coastal areas and others (see sidebar) — as a habitat.

"We now study the ecology of wetlands, including all marine life and flora, to understand how to manage and conserve wetlands so that they will be around 50 years down the road," says programme officer Rebecca D’Cruz.

"We work with all countries in Asia Pacific, from Siberia to Australia; and from the Middle East to the Philippines," she adds.

According to D’Cruz, the first three years of the organization were spent in linking up with agencies and wildlife societies in these countries to get them to monitor wetland sites.

There are 94 such monitoring stations in Malaysia alone.

The AWB now monitors about 360 different species of shorebirds, with details of their migration patterns and the ecologies that support them.

It also conducts surveys and publish reports (among them is the annual Asian Waterfowl Census) and detailed studies on peat swamps and mangrove forests, and also acts as a consultancy.

The Asian Wetland directory, which it last published in 1989, puts to shame an IBM manual. It’s a massive tome, nearly 1,200 pages thick, covering wetland sites in 25 countries.

It turned out to be one of the factors that drove the AWB to develop and implement a database dedicated to Asian wetlands.

The AWB is not an extensive or intensive user of IT.

It has a staff of 27 who share the 15 or so IBM-compatible PCs scattered throughout its office at the Institute of Advanced Studies in University Malaya.

The bulk of the PCs — primarily 386-based machines, plus a couple of 486 systems and half a dozen laptops — run the usual office automation software like word processors, spreadsheets and others.

But it’s the two PCs located in’ a small room crammed with reports, studies and discussion papers that make the difference. That’s where the database is located.

"We have had years and years of information, which we would like to be able to distribute to more parties," D’Cruz says. "This would be one way to create a greater awareness of the role wetlands play in our ecology."

"Unfortunately, most of the information comes in technical reports which cannot be used by the man in the street," she adds.

So the idea of creating a user-friendly database was born, initially in AWB’s operation in Sumatra where some biologists got together and developed it on the FoxPro database system.

The office at UM, which is also the international office for AWB, got hold of the copy and customized it for local use: all in all, about 13MB of information on wetlands.

The menu-driven database contains information that is divided by country, site, habitat type, flora and fauna types and others.

The details of each site also includes its legal status (that is, whether it is a protected area or a national reserve, etc) and even legislation that may cover it.

"It’s not meant to be an online, regional database," D’Cruz says. "It would have to be customized for each country, and would thus have to operate on a standalone basis."

"Eventually, we hope to have such a database in every country," she adds.

The advantage of having such a database is easily seen: first, instead of having to wait for a new directory to be published, information can be updated immediately.

Anyone who wants to can get the latest information on any wetland site in Malaysia, and not have to depend on a study published four years ago.

Furthermore, the AWB knows that its information is most valuable if it can be sent to the right authorities: the policy-makers and the Government.

Now it can communicate its findings to any government agency or department by downloading the information onto a diskette and sending it off to the relevant party.

This is important because Malaysia has lost about 50 to 60 per cent of its mangrove swamps from 1965 to 1985, most of them irreparably damaged.

"The rate is accelerating with all the industrialization, aquaculture and housing development projects that are being approved," says D’Cruz. "Such projects can destroy the surrounding wetlands unless proper measures are taken."

"We would like to see our in formation go out to the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) consultants who have approved these projects," she says. "This way, they can take more than just social and economic factors into consideration when they do their studies."

The Asian Wetland Database is far from complete, with information still being fed into it. It may need another two years for all the bugs to be ironed out.

"It’s got some faults," D’Cruz laughs. "For one thing, it was developed by biologists, and has got some pretty technical terms in there."

And just to prove it, she shot some words at us that had us reporters wishing that we’d brought our biology textbooks along.

Source : The Star, June 1, 1993

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