ETFRN NEWS 24

Research Cooperation Sought

LINKING POLICY DEVELOPMENT AND FIELD ACTIONS

The DGIS-WWF Tropical Forest Portfolio is implementing seven integrated conservation and development projects (ICDPs) in Honduras, Ecuador, Gabon (2), Ethiopia, Pakistan and the Philippines, with funding from the Dutch government. The goals of these projects are to link biodiversity conservation with local social and economic development emphasizing local participation in design and implementation.
ICDPs have become the dominant tropical conservation approach supported by NGOs, development agencies and governments, yet little is known about the ingredients for success. There is still a lack of cases where local peoples' development needs have been effectively reconciled with natural resource management. Two particular problems have been identified: failure to establish coherent links between conservation objectives and investments in local development, and an inability to confront national policy and institutional factors which pose barriers to success.
The DGIS-WWF Tropical Forest Portfolio is managed and coordinated by an Interregional Project. Within this project, the ICDP Adaptive Learning Process aims to use project experiences to make ICDP conservation approaches more effective, and then to communicate these findings. Particular emphasis will be placed on three closely-related activities:
  1. Key linkages between the ICDPs in the field and both local and national policies and institutions will be identified and analyzed to highlight the most critical factors affecting project success (linkages analysis).
  2. Strategies will be developed and launched to try to influence *upstream* policies and institutions through discussions with policymakers on the basis of *downstream* ICDP experience, with information and lessons flowing both upstream and downstream (policy dialogue).
  3. ICDP experiences and their impact on policy and institutional change will be monitored, evaluated, documented and disseminated (documentation and communications).
Ecuador, Gabon and possibly Ethiopia have been identified as the first Portfolio countries in which to test this methodology. The Portfolio is looking for partners with experience in policy analysis and tropical forest conservation with which to collaborate.

For more information, please contact:
Thomas McShane, Coordinator, DGIS-WWF Tropical Forest Portfolio, WWF, Gland, Switzerland. E-mail: tmcshane@wwfnet.org.
Michael Wells, Environmental Economist and Policy Analyst, Lier, Norway. E-mail: wells@online.no.


Rainforest Tower

Christopher Lee is a graduate from Montana State University. His thesis involved researching and designing a prefabricated tower to be used in remote rainforest sites that houses its occupants and provides them with all the basic field laboratory facilities necessary. It was designed to solve a number of the pitfalls associated with such work, such as access to and from the station and environmental impact etc. He has no financial ambition for his project but would like to share this information with anyone who is in a position to use and possible develop the idea.
Interested parties can receive more information and a copy of the project by contacting:
Christopher Lee, Email: ctlee@sisna.com

Canopy Crane

The Surumoni Project encourages complementary or collaborative research proposals for canopy crane use.

BioCISE - A BIOLOGICAL COLLECTION INFORMATION SERVICE IN EUROPA - Resource Identification

BioCISE is a multidisciplinary Concerted Action project funded by the European Commission (DG XII). Its aim is to identify and analyse databases of biological collection objects in Europe. The results of the survey will be made public on the World Wide Web and will serve to formulate a proposal for the creation of a European Biological Collection Information Service. Project participants include 20 scientists from 10 EU states and Israel. The co-ordinating project secretariat with 4 members is housed by the Botanical Garden and Botanical Museum Berlin-Dahlem.

The term 'Biological Collection' is understood to include the following main categories: living collections (micro-organisms, botanical and zoological gardens), natural history collections (mainly in museums and universities), data collections (such as used in faunistic and floristic mapping projects), as well as new forms of biological collections (e.g. natural products, collections with the aim to preserve endangered species, and gene banks). The size of the collection is of secondary importance; on the contrary, we are specifically interested to include smaller and/or highly specialised collections.

By the end of 1999, the project is to develop specifications for a system serving both the wide range of potential users of collection information as well as the researchers and curators of the collections themselves. For that purpose, a comprehensive survey is carried out, where possible in co-operation with other organisations and projects. Collection information database resources are to be identified and documented, potential users found, and technical possibilities for the implementation of the service evaluated.

The results will be made public by a constantly updated Internet documentation (see http://www.bgbm.fu-berlin.de/biocise/, also for more details concerning the project). Beginning in 1999, the results will be used to formulate a project proposal to obtain the funding for the implementation phase of the project.

We should like to ask all institutions and organisations holding biological collection databases to participate in the survey. In case you did not receive the questionnaire, you can either download it from http://www.bgbm.fu-berlin.de/biocise/TheProject/Survey/ or request it from:
Walter G. Berendsohn, Project Coordinator
BioCISE, BGBM, Königin-Luise-Str. 6-8,
14191 Berlin, Germany
Email: biocise@zedat.fu-berlin.de Fax: +49 30 84172 954