Project Background
Biological resources or biodiversity are crucial for the
development of poor countries in the tropics. Native plants and animals are
particularly important to peasant and indigenous populations in rural areas; these
people often depend directly on harvesting local species for their daily needs
such as energy (fire-wood), food, medicine, and construction material. Peasants
and indigenous groups are often the first to suffer from environmental
degradation such as deforestation that may have extensive negative impacts.
Sustainable management of biological resources may therefore contribute
significantly to economic development and improved livelihoods for rural
people, but currently the biodiversity of poor tropical countries are often
under severe stress or even in danger of irreplaceable loss. This situation
partly reflects complex, interacting economic, political and socio-economic
factors, but lack of basic knowledge and lack of access to existing knowledge
may be the most serious impediment to sustainable resource use and management.
Most tropical plants and animals and their interactions with the environment
are poorly known, and in many cases their actual and potential economic values
and potential management have not been evaluated. Many developing countries
suffer from poor access to existing printed and electronic information
concerning their own biodiversity resources. These countries have poor contacts
to the international scientific community and they have few trained people who
can interpret and evaluate information. Finally, their facilities to generate
new knowledge are often poorly developed, and it is therefore difficult to
promote a development that takes advantage of existing knowledge.
The
overall objective af this
project is to facilitate that local flora and fauna may persist and support
economic development and the well-being in
Basic
research that is needed to take advantage of the two countries’ biodiversity
began only decades ago. The biodiversity of
The
project is built around research concerning economically important species, and
it produces inventories of useful species, and studies of their potential for
exploitation and sustainable management, as well as their ecology, variation
and distribution. A part of this research is to provide expertise in natural
substance chemistry enabling scientists from the two countries to use the
economic potential of their biodiversity in a sustainable way. A transversal
priority is to ensure Bolivia and Ecuador access to international printed and
electronic biodiversity information, particularly linking the participating
institutions with the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF;
www.gbif.org) and the Andinonet initiative recently
established in the region, as well as to the Regional Strategy of Biodiversity
Conservation. Computer equipment and networking is updated, and staff and
students are trained in using databases and other modern IT technology in
research concerning biodiversity and natural resources management. The project
intends to demonstrate that developing countries can participate in and benefit
from global networking projects such as the GBIF-initiative, Andinonet, and the projects’ ambition is to serve as a
model for an equal and active collaboration between industrialized and
developing countries in biodiversity research and informatics.
Dissemination Strategy
This project intends to improve the
participating institutions capacity to produce and capture relevant
biodiversity related information, process it and make it available to a broad
range of users in the private and public sector.
The intended users include local communities of peasants and
indigenous people who wish to use plant and animal species of their
surroundings in a sustainable way, government
authorities who protect and manage of natural biological resources, local industries that produce plant or
animal-derived products such as human or veterinary medicines, local NGO’s who carry out community
projects with biodiversity components, forestry
projects that need exact identification of their tree species to access
biological information, etc.
The trained biodiversity workers and
researchers will be intermediaries between those who use and those who produce
and manage biodiversity information.
The expected long term outcome is that the
involved institutions will have the capacity to contribute to a wiser use of
their countries' biological resources and that these resources will be
protected from destruction and made available to poor rural populations as well
as industries that contribute to the economic development of the countries.
Results will be disseminated via the national and international
journals, conference presentations, lectures, workshops, etc. Because traditional biodiversity documentation is often
difficult to use by non-specialists or even for professionals from related
disciplines (e.g., botanical
identification work for zoologists or vice versa), this project will emphasize
user-friendly documentation of biodiversity, such as publicly accessible
internet based web-pages photo-recording the identification characteristics of
particular groups of plants and animals, as well as relevant information
concerning uses, management, etc. The
project will initially elaborate documentation related to economically
important species, but it is envisioned that eventually other parts of the
native flora and much of the fauna may be included.
Organisation and financial management
The project is managed principally by the Danish Research Institution, at the
A Steering Committee
oversees the project, review yearly plans for upcoming activities and yearly
reports of past activities for each of the involved institutions. The Steering
Committee reports its approval of, or concerns about, these plans and reports to the
project director, professor Henrik Balslev, who is responsible to the funding agency, Danida.