- Summary
- Objectives
- Status
- Project Publications
The wide gap between the need and actual knowledge of spatial tools in the research community engaged in conservation and ecological research remains a major challenge. This is clearly a handicap for conservation action and research and will place limits on their ability to understand spatially explicit relationships which often define ecological processes.
Emerging from this need this project tried to close the gaps in four subject areas, namely, GIS and remote sensing, spatial statistics, landscape ecology and hydrology.
1. To demonstrate open source GIS and remote sensing software for conservation planning. This will enable interested institutes to adopt these technologies in their respective research programmes at little or no cost.
2. To use data that is already hosted on the Western Ghats portal (WGP) as part of the courses so that the tutorials can be modified to other regions and there is a large user base for the portal and its facilities.
3. To design the courses on an on-line course management software - Moodle (http://www.moodle.org) and serve them off both the FERAL as well as the WGP server.
4. To make available the courses as backups under open source licensing so they can be used by institutions and adapted for their own purposes without concerns of patents or royalty.
- Training workshops where over a hundred researchers and professionals participated were jointly hosted with partner institutes leading to the creation of a network of experts on these subjects.
- To facilitate the tutorials to be modified to other regions and to increase the user base for the Western Ghats Portal and its facilities, the workshops used data that is already hosted on the Portal.
- Six online courses were set up on the FERAL Moodle site covering GIS and remote sensing using both Quantum GIS and GRASS and applications of R in combination with these GIS packages in landscape ecology, spatial statistics and hydrology. Teaching materials, reading lists, tutorials and quizzes have been curated and is being shared with the teaching community and other researchers.