Friday, May 13 2005 19:20 Hrs (IST) - World Time -

Bangalore: India's first Eco-Informatics Centre to further conservation and ecological management was today (May 13, 2005) launched by the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and Environment (ATREE), a non-profit trust in Bangalore.

The Centre will bring together knowledge in the fields of Information Technology and ecology to further conservation and for "wise management of India's resources", Dr K S Bawa, President ATREE told reporters announcing the launch of the Centre.

The Centre will actively promote national and international collaboration in applied research and capacity building in the field of eco-informatics, he said.

The Centre, based out of Bangalore, is in collaboration with the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) and Hewlett-Packard (HP) with support from the United Nations Foundation and the Indo-US Science and Technology Forum.

The Centre addresses an urgent need to evolve an umbrella mechanism to integrate relevant scientific knowledge to deal with natural resource management and conservation issues through "coordinated action between non-Government, private sector and Government agencies" to deal with prevailing issues in the area, Bawa said.

The unique feature of the Centre is information critical to success in conservation and management of diminishing biological resources would be readily available to professionals, decision makers and it will serve as a source of information on biodiversity and environment to the general public, he said.

Unveiling the Centre's website (www.ecoinfoindia.org) possible through HP technology, M Y S Prasad, Director of ISRO's (Indian Scientific Research Organisation) Master Control Facility at Hassan, said such centre which is a "synergy of BT, IT and Space for sharpening the project activities will really help these sectors grow".

With the growing global concern for environment and "developmental agenda high on the priority of Governments, such a centre symbolising coming together of academia, Government and industry should be replicated", he said.

He hoped that the Centre, the first in India, would become a hub for the whole of South-East Asia.

The website hosts a web-enabled Geographic Information Systems (GIS) facility built on MapInfo's technology, permits interactive querying and mapping of spatially referenced information, Dr M Irfan Ullah, Fellow ATREE and the brain behind the website said.

The website gives free of cost geographic information on conservation and environment, which could benefit policy makers in the ministries of environment and forest and also researchers, students and educators, he said.

ATREE has signed an MoU with National Chemical Laboratory (NCL) Pune for building institutional collaboration and data sharing for conservation and natural resource management, Bawa said.

It (ATREE) has also been awarded a grant by MapInfo-global leader in location-based software solutions to establish an internship programme which will allow a select group of national and international students to work on development of webGIS related tools using JAVA technology, he said.