JRS Biodiversity Foundation

Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment

Organization: Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE)

Project Location: India

Web Address: www.atree.org

Title of Grant: "Eco-informatics for Conservation and Sustainable Use of Biodiversity in India"

Grant Amount: $175,950 over 2 years

Principal Investigator: Kamaljit S. Bawa

Organization Background:

The Ashoka Trust for Research and the Environment (ATREE) was established in 1996 to combine principles of natural and social sciences to conserve biodiversity and promote sustainable development. It works to build social and human capital needed to address environmental challenges in India. ATREE deals with the issues relating to India's rapidly diminishing biological resources and natural ecosystems. It addresses social and economic dimensions and implications of environmental decline. ATREE has a network of four offices and field stations across India, through which it works to develop social and human capital to address environmental issues at local, regional and national levels.

The programs at ATREE are designed to enhance the prospects for conservation by working with civil society, local communities, and policy makers on the one hand, and by scientific research on the other. Activities are organized under interdisciplinary research combined with action, education, and outreach, including policy and governance reforms. ATREE integrates these activities into programs that generate and disseminate new knowledge, and foster innovative change in the way environmental problems are tackled.

Grant Description:

This 2 year grant will increase the conceptual and practical understanding of informatics and emergent properties of information systems related to biodiversity throughout India.

The Problem:

India is home to an exceptionally high level of biodiversity, and to nearly one-fifth of the world’s population. To preserve the former in ways which sustain and support the latter is a matter of urgency. An impediment to conservation and sustainable utilization of biodiversity in India is the lack of easy availability to access, retrieve, use, and disseminate biodiversity information.

ATREE believes that making this type of knowledge more available is a key requirement for the conservation of biodiversity. Such information includes the amount, kind, and spatial distribution of biodiversity; its actual and potential uses and values (e.g., medicinal, social and economic); the effects of humans on biodiversity; and the social, legal, and policy aspects of conservation and the sustainable use of biodiversity.

The Solution:

ATREE is planning to work through its two year old Center for Eco-informatics to develop a web-based, collaborative framework, to interconnect existing databases and to make them readily accessible to stakeholders. The organization proposes to do this by implementing four specific objectives:

Develop taxonomic and landscape level databases.
Expand capacity-building efforts by training professionals in handling large databases, niche modeling, Geographical Information System and Remote Sensing based analysis, and information management.
Enrich existing databases; develop new tools and novel ways to process, analyze and disseminate information.
Collaborate on development of the national biodiversity and bio-resource portal.

ATREE’s Eco-informatics Center is intellectually, geographically and politically suited to do the proposed work. It has a demonstrated record in applied conservation science, in biodiversity conservation research, and in development of cyberinfrastructure, data bases, and web tools. The Center now has its own national and international partners and collaborators.

The proposed work will form the basis of ATREE’s long term efforts. It will substantially create, define, and implement biodiversity conservation, eco-informatics, cyberinfrastructure, and sustainable human-environmental interactions both locally and globally.

Global Impact:

While the work to be undertaken by ATREE will be implemented in a two year time frame, it will promote throughout all India, the enlargement of biodiversity knowledge, knowledge that can be disseminated to researchers and civil society alike. As part of the World Heritage Biodiversity - India Program, ATREE will also strengthen biodiversity conservation in protected areas globally by building replicable models for other existing and proposed UNESCO World Heritage Biodiversity sites.