Whether
tracking invasive species, assessing water quality, or monitoring
disease spread, comprehensive data collection is a key component
of sustainable natural resource management. Increasingly, fostering
community-based monitoring is seen as a valuable way to augment data
gathering and enhance public involvement in environmental management.
However, growing quantities of data and increasing interest from
the public and decision-makers create technical data storage and
access issues. While not yet widely used in natural resource management,
web-based Geographic Information Systems (webGIS), a hybrid of GIS
and Internet technologies, present a promising avenue for entering
and storing heterogeneous datasets – indexed by location – and
making them widely available in a visual, dynamic, and interactive
format using any web browser. Although webGIS has the potential to
increase public participation in environmental management, there
are technical, institutional, and social challenges to webGIS implementation
and usage that need to be addressed, including differential Internet
access, training, and privacy. Karin Tuxen, Faith Kearns, Brent Pedersen and Ken'ichi Ueda are all part of this work.
Links:
OakMapper (enter
information about trees, and view distribution maps)
Wieslander
Vegetation Type Mapping Project
Fire
Information Engine
