Information and communications technology has a growing role in international development.  Global connectivity through the Internet and through mobile phone technology is bringing people closer together to trade, share, and learn in a wide range of sectors, from agriculture, to manufacturing, financial services to water supply.

4In coming weeks and months, we will feature innovations in ICT for environmental protection and the sustainable use of natural resources in these pages.  Today we will begin with an overview of some of the different ways in which ICT can be used, and give a few examples of innovative products that we think can make a difference.  Someday, we would like to have an exhaustive survey of tools. Those of you who are reading this are almost certainly already familiar with the topic.  If that’s the case, you’ll know the power of social networking.  Let’s do a little social networking of our own and share ideas about ICT for natural resources – either innovations that you feel the world should know more about, or ideas that you have for innovations that should be brought to the attention of technology community.

ICT can make a difference in natural resource management in several ways.  A major contribution the improvement of information used for decision making and access to that information. The science of data management is called informatics, and sometimes when the term is used for environmental sciences, it is called ecoinformatics. A key to good data management is interoperability. To better understand trends and causal relationships, it is necessary to combine data from different sources. Doing this requires the development of standards and protocols for describing phenomena, as well as quality control to ensure that the knowledge that results is based on facts.  We will review ecoinformatics in more detail in later posts; for now, have a look at Data Basin, a fantastic tool for curating data that can be located in space and time using maps.  Data Basin provides a way to host and manipulate data sets to create knowledge – to tell a story based upon observations.  But it goes further – it includes a reputation system for ranking data sets, and social networking tools to bring data users together to interpret, critique, and collaborate in the development of knowledge products.

Of course, information is not very useful if it is not accessible.  And access to reliable information has long been a barrier to effective decision-making in many parts of the world.  This is changing.  Not only is direct access to the Internet expanding, but mobile smartphones can be used in many parts of the world to send and receive data.  An exciting development is the use of mobile applications, or “apps”, to address specific needs.  For example, the World Bank DataFinder app can be used to quickly access economic data from the World Bank’s own data servers. (Unfortunately, the first version is exclusively written for the iPhone, a device not readily available in much of the developing world.)  Mapping apps are proliferating, allowing access to topographic and thematic maps.  And farmers can use apps to learn the price of, and even sell, their commodities.  The World Bank is also sponsoring an Apps for Development competition to find new uses for World Bank data recently made publicly available.  Unfortunately, many of the submissions deal with global policy issues and there are few practical tools for natural resource management, agriculture, health, and other pressing development issues on the ground.  This will change once a demand from the field emerges, and we find better ways to link application developers with development and natural resource management practitioners. In 2009 USAID sponsored a competition, Development 2.0 through NetSquared, a technology service for social benefit organizations sponsored by Techsoup Global, a non-profit organization that helps NGOs to access donations of hardware, software, and training from the ICT industry.  Innovative partnerships such as USAID’s collaborations with NetSquared and NetHope.  NetHope is a partnership of technology providers and humanitarian organizations working to solve technology challenges.  NetHope is a Global Broadband Innovations Initiative partner.

The ability to remotely sense and monitor natural resources is an important new tool for scientists and managers.  In future weeks we will explore how ICT is being used to monitor global change, monitor biodiversity in the tropical forest canopy, monitor coral reefs, track the chain of custody of logs harvested in West African rainforests, and detect forest fires in Central America.  ICT has the potential to help identify potential links between a changing climate and disease outbreaks, forest and agricultural pests and food prices.

ICT can have significant affects where time lags are a barrier to achieving goals.  For example, early responses to emergencies such as forest fires or pest/disease/invasive species outbreaks are much more cost effective and more likely to be successful than late responses. It can also make a difference when markets are involved. For example, carbon credit monitoring can be made much for efficient, and importantly, the confidence in the effectiveness of the investment can increase when time lags concerning data about the status and extent of the resource can be eliminated. Note how the artificial boundaries created by thinking in terms of “sectors” such as agriculture, environment, and health, can blur when using data in innovative ways made possible through ICT tools.

ICT can also empower communities by enabling them to collect their own data, making it possible to overcome barriers to effective participation due to nonexistent or inaccessible information, and lessen their dependence upon often inaccessible outside experts.  Using ICT communities can monitor resource use, integrate traditional ecological knowledge with scientific data, and participate as full partners in decision-making processes.  A participatory Geographic Information Systems (computer mapping) community already exists, and an international grassroots mapping network is sharing progress using low-cost tools such as digital cameras and kites or helium balloons to create highly detailed area maps.

• We will also review some yet unmet needs that ICT can fulfill, such as:

• Real-time access to information to help port inspectors to identify pests while performing their duties (e.g., warehouses, docks)
• Access to keys to help parataxonomists working to identify specimens of rare or harmful species
• Remote upload of information from field observations and query of decision support tools that can be used in a dynamic situation like a disaster response.
• Information on spot markets for natural resource products and for reservations and logistics for remote tourism facilities such as ecotourism operations, often associated with parks and protected areas.

Some additional considerations involve the possibility of social barriers to the use of ICT.  For example, women and men may have different access to ICT, as well as different needs and different ways of approaching its use.  Frequently, access to tools and equipment by women remains problematic even when ICT is available to the community. We will look for examples of how use patterns, specific needs, and cultural contexts are being used to maximize women’s participation in technology transfer.  More technology-savvy youth may dominate ICT, limiting its use by elders and thereby failing to access important historical knowledge and perspectives.  As with gender, care should be taken in introducing technologies to ensure that its use doesn’t promote inequality or skew the generation of knowledge.

Here are some tools for natural resource management that we will look at in more depth.

1) GPS. Global Positioning System. Used for recording location, useful for georeferencing data entry and producing maps.  Often integrated into cameras and smartphones. Geotagging photographs links a visual record to an observation.

2) GIS. Geographic Information System.  Manipulates georeferenced data in “map layers” to permit overlaying and comparing different types of information. GIS can integrate georeferenced field observations (e.g., from GPS) with remotely sensed images from satellites and aircraft, and digitized maps of terrain, landcover, infrastructure, demography, etc.  Extremely complex to use and expensive in commercial versions; open source GIS is growing rapidly to overcome barriers to entry by communities, small businesses and local government.  The discipline of participatory GIS (PGIS) focuses on making tools and techniques available to communities for natural resource planning. The PGIS community provides peer to peer technical assistance through a web site and email list.

3.  Telecommunications.  Voice, text (SMS) messaging, and other data transmitted over handheld devices used in natural resource management for managing, monitoring and reporting.

4.  Remote sensing.  Some satellite remote sensing data has been made freely available and is accessible providing the technology is in place to receive and process it.  Other data, primarily from high resolution commercial instruments, can be extremely expensive.  Efforts to overcome these barriers include:

• Terralook, a service developed by NASA and provided by USGS includes georectified LANDSAT and ASTER images as high resolution JPEG compressed images.  Terralook provides a free opensource viewer that allows users to do basic measurements, annotations, and classifications of the images.

• Several projects have supported the development of a hybrid GPS and camera system that can be mounted on fixed and rotary winged aircraft for mapping along transects, with software to connect tiles to provide a large-scale georeferenced image that can be used with GIS systems (high resolution cameras have been able to capture images as small as 5 cm at 1500′ elevation).

• Automated remote monitoring.  An early example of the use of ICT for natural resource management was the US Forest Service’s Remote Automated Weather Stations (RAWS) deployed throughout western forests in the US to monitor fire weather.  Advances in technology now make it possible to create environmental sensor networks using high-tech miniature robots to record minute changes in the environment and transmitting the data to computers through telecommunications networks or satellite uplinks.  In the USA, a consortium of research institutions has created a National Ecological Observatory Network to monitor environmental impacts and changes. With the costs declining, these tools will soon be within reach of developing countries, to monitor critical watersheds, environmental impacts of extractive industries, and the habitats of rare and endangered species.

Technology transfer is an important tool for achieving global goals for economic development, biodiversity conservation, and the protection of ecosystem services.  It can help to advance effective governance and rule of law through a more informed, mobilized public and better monitoring of resource use to ensure that it is lawful as well as sustainable.  As a package, better governance and better information will provide an improved chance to lift the rural poor of the world out of poverty.