About The ESRI Conservation Program

At the 1991 International User Conference, ESRI announced the formation of a new Conservation Users Special Interest Group, now called the ESRI Conservation Program (ECP). This group is a membership organization consisting of local and international conservation organizations, GIS hardware and software manufacturers, large GIS users interested in supporting conservation programs, and donors. Membership is open without charge to any individual representing or affiliated with such institutions, whether they use a GIS or not. This statement outlines the philosophy and goals of the Program and reviews its progress to date. It will serve as the basis for a formal funding proposal to allow for expansion of these services to other conservation groups. This program is designed to serve the conservation community, so this statement is being circulated within the community to allow for review and comments and to invite partnerships prior to drafting a final formal proposal.

The environment has become the single most important issue worldwide as we enter the 21st century. As human populations exceed the limits of biological resources everywhere, and greed for quick profits pushes exploitation without limit, the very fabric of our natural systems is threatened and human civilization itself lies in peril. If humans are to survive, we must become stewards of our home rather than demolishers. We have come to realize that biodiversity, the wide variety of living species, is a critical factor in the health of our planet. We live in a time of incredibly rapid change, even so, there are still opportunities for concerted action to protect and manage what remains of our natural heritage so that we may ensure the survival and enlightenment of future generations. To be effective, however, action must be based upon accurate information and continuous review.

Some have called this "The Information Age" since its progress and politics have been guided by control of information in the same way that development during the previous "Industrial Age" was guided by control over industry and mass production. The advent of the computer and huge databases inspecting every aspect of our lives has certainly made this apellation frighteningly real to many of us. Who controls access to information may become the principle social issue of the next decade as access itself becomes an important measure of political power. In some African countries, the private ownership of small computers was discouraged in the mid-eighties because they were perceived as subversive. Like most weapons, however, computers can cut both ways. The very power that allows them to control access to data can also be harnessed by individuals to collect and manage data independently. Historically, however, technology has often been a barrier to the free flow of information. The centralized use of computers in many institutions has often generated huge databases which are so complex and self-serving that no one, from the individual right up to the managers who operate it, can obtain useful information from them in a timely manner. As the saying goes you start with raw data, then ask meaningful questions of it to produce information, which is combined with human experience and wisdom to produce knowledge. Unfortunately, most large data-bases are exactly that, collections of raw data that still require a lot of questions and analyses before they can become information or put to use as knowledge. In order to become knowledge, it is essential that data be controlled and managed by the users who depend on it for their day-to-day activities.

Perhaps the clearest illustration of the information crisis is in resources management. As industrialized countries increase their ability to peer at the planet and garner detailed resources information, they are frequently in the position of having better data than the resources management agencies in the countries themselves. This unequal access to information can lead to inequalities in control over the decisions made about the resources. The critical flaw in this is that the local occupants of any biotic system, especially indigenous people, usually know much more about how that system works than any national or international agency, since it is very often their livelihood. Because this knowledge is often informal, ranging from folklore and taboos to family tradition, it is often ignored when placed against the sorts of high-tech presentations that large development projects can utilize. Unfortunately, large externally-controlled development projects never seem to get it right since they often neglect long-term goals of sustainability. Africa is littered with the corpses of projects that failed for the most elementary of reasons. Local communities are frequently well aware of the history of development attempts in their area and can be quite lucid about why failure occurs and how to avoid it. Unfortunately, they are seldom consulted and local approval is seldom valued. This is ironic in that it is usually the locals who pay the most severe costs of overexploitation and bungled efforts.

The cooperation of local people is essential to the action that will be needed to protect and manage earth's environment, and to achieve this, there must be ready access to resources information at the local level and well-established methods for incorporating local knowledge and priorities in any larger-scale decisions. The more widely such information can be shared, the more likely it is that all aspects of local knowledge will be included and the more likely a commonly-agreed solution becomes. When computer tools are applied in these circumstances, great care must be taken to keep the focus on the human and not the tool. One of the most common mistakes illustrating this point is the tendency of computer programmers to assume that if a computer is involved then the normal usage by an individual will be in front of a screen punching keys, when in fact this is the least appropriate use. It is far more logical to think of the average user as getting their information as they always have, from a respected individual or a piece of paper or a map, while the computer's role is to drive the production of these various paper and other types of outputs for dissemination in the most appropriate manner possible. Finally, issues of local control over information and decisions are often politically sensitive, and a great deal of tact and sensitivity is required when outside agencies become directly involved in such processes. Rather than direct involvement, however, the ECP approach is to empower local people who are already showing some effectiveness in mobilizing local action.

Some of the most effective conservation programs are in Zimbabwe and Zambia where local people are given control over and management responsibility for wildlife species. Once wildlife is seen as a husbandry opportunity then vast numbers of would-be poachers are readily turned into active stewards and game scouts. The ECP already actively supports the Zambian program and will soon include the Zimbabwean program as well.

In a recent joint statement on world biodiversity (1), the world's major conservation organizations concluded three things: 1. Nature is diverse 2. This diversity must be preserved, and 3. Knowledge about diversity is very inadequate because species and ecosystems are so numerous and the rate of progress in describing them very slow. Conservative estimates give a figure of 10 million species alive in the world today, yet in the past 230 years scientists have only managed to describe 1.4 million species. At this rate it would take over 1,600 years to finish the job. There is a clear need to protect as many unknown species as possible and a need for better, faster tools to assist in species and ecosystem description for those areas which cannot be protected. At current extinction rates the next few years may provide the only opportunity to collect information on many species and habitats, before they disappear forever.

Solving these environmental information and management problems with local participation requires the ability to combine and integrate many different viewpoints and many different bodies of knowledge about the environment. The Ecology movement taught us all that the environment could only be understood if seen as an integrated system and studied in an interdisciplinary fashion.

GIS stands for Geographic Information System, and it is variously defined as a computer-based system for the storage, management and analysis of geographic information and associated data. Perhaps its most important characteristic, however, is that it allows a wide variety of data to be integrated and combined in a formal, logical manner on the basis of spatial relationships. If a problem or data has a spatial component, then a GIS allows it to be analyzed and interpreted spatially, in ways never before possible with manual maps, tabular computer databases or statistical techniques. The GIS is thus the first analytical tool that allows us to directly implement the ecological view of reality and to achieve a holistic information management capability, which is why it holds such promise in the struggle to solve the difficult biological and management problems that lie ahead.

This integrative capability derives directly from the advanced data processing abilities of the computer, so while many of the concepts of a GIS can be applied to manual map management systems, these are not true GIS's. There are also computerized map databases and CAD systems which are only capable of graphic operations and amount to little more than just a digital version of a paper map, easier to edit perhaps but definitely not a GIS since they lack any of the analytical and integrative functions. Among true GIS's there has previously been a split between so-called "raster" and "vector" systems. Raster systems divide the world into a grid of cells, each cell receiving a value. Since remote sensing data comes in this format, raster systems are essential for processing satellite images, and raster formats are better for some simple GIS functions. While limited, the raster model is simpler to write programs for so many custom and in-house GIS's are built upon this model. Unfortunately, raster systems have historically presented greater difficulties for relational database design since each spatial feature must be represented as a large number of cells rather than as a single exact feature. Vector systems derive from the formal mathematics of 2- dimensional planar topology and relational algebra, and are generally better platforms for the sorts of complex spatial and statistical analyses that a GIS is often set up for in the first place. Since each spatial feature is represented as a single entry in each table, various relationships are easier to represent. ArcInfo was the first, and is still the leading GIS system, and with the current release ArcInfo integrates raster modelling capabilities with vector capabilities. Both of these tool sets are integrated with relational attribute tables. With this advance, the argument over which is better, raster or vector, becomes moot.

The capability for advanced analysis always carries a price: data must be formally defined and structured or the products of the analyses will have no meaning. Database design is the process whereby raw data sources, database management methods and quality control procedures, and the desired analytical operations are all integrated into a formal plan which can guide the data entry and computer programming tasks yet is still intelligible to the end-users so they can control the near-constant tendency of computer programs and databases to whirl off into irrelevancy. Formally stated, a database design must define 3 things: 1. data structures: how the data will be partitioned into files and how these files will be related to one another 2. Integrity rules: What kinds and values of data are valid for this database, what relationships represent valid real-world phenomena, how is a quality control error defined 3. Operators: What analytical operations will this database support? What operations will produce garbage data and must therefore be prohibited? These design activities are often carried out by specialist consultants and analysts. A GIS cannot reach its fullest potential for integration and data sharing without such a design, in the same way that a car cannot achieve purposeful travel across unfamiliar terrain without a map. Unfortunately, there is no easy fix for a good database design. Designs carried out apart from the users of the system are often worthless and irrelevant. Design activities carried out by outside agencies on behalf of an organization run the same risk. To be successful, the database design process must be viewed as an intimately cooperative effort among the users themselves, and a good database designer functions more as a facilitator between users, teaching them enough about the design process so they can control it directly, while providing an overview to help tie the different user requirements together. The idea of teaching users how to solve their own GIS problems rather than trying to build databases or conduct analyses for them is fundamental to the philosophy of successful and self- sustaining GIS.