Development of Biodiversity Information System for North East India Using Internet Gis

Conservation of Biological Diversity will be major challenge for the ecologist in the forthcoming century. In-situ conservation, biotechnology tools for conservation and prospecting, understanding genetic variability, species habitat relationship and allowing evolutionary process of speciation are some of the challenges. India is one of the mega biodiversity centers and is also known for its traditional knowledge of conservation. The varied regions of the country, with unique floristic and faunal richness, their vastness, endemism, heterogeneity and also inaccessibility of large areas have necessitated creation of authentic baseline data on biodiversity. This information system is essential to monitor, analyze and plan action oriented programs for conserving and preserving our biological wealth. North Eastern India is one of the three mega diversity hotspots in the country. The region is referred as a cradle of flowering plants as it lies in the region of conjunction of biogeographical zones of India viz. Indo-China, Indo-Malayan and Gondwana land masses. The spatial characterization of landscape structures and its linkage with attribute information on the floristic composition, economic valuation, endemism has been developed in the form of Biodiversity Information System (BIS) on sharable environment. The BIS is integration of large databases using a concept of Internet based Geographical Information System commonly known as Internet GIS. The development of BIS involves the basic framework of concept, selection, and aggregation of fundamental and processed data. The information generated as a part of project entitled “Biodiversity Characterization at Landscape Level using Remote Sensing and Geographic Information System” of the Department of Biotechnology and the Department of Space, Government of India has information on vegetation type/ land use, disturbance regimes, biological richness, ancillary information from different sources and non spatial attribute database on plant species (field sample and flora). The database has been organized under the sharable framework with metadata, quality evaluation procedures and their standardization. The different database structure created on different formats/platforms comes as an input to the information system for standardization that is they are converted into the same format. The non-spatial species database is converted into a relational database structure and the geospatial data is converted to a uniform spatial projection. The conversion of data from the various available formats also constituted reverse engineering of the databases using Visual Basic, Oracle and the database format software and Open Data Base Connectivity (ODBC). The web enabling part comes through uploading the entire spatial and the non-spatial data at a common platform using the concept of Internet GIS. We use ArcSDE, ArcInfo, Oracle at the backend, ArcIMS as the Internet Map Server and Microsoft Internet Information Server 4.0 as the web server.