The Biodiversity and Protected Area Management (BIOPAMA) programme is announcing a series of technical workshops in the Caribbean aimed at equipping protected areas management professionals with the tools and skills to contribute in a meaningful way to the database of The Caribbean Protected Areas Gateway (The Caribbean Gateway).

The Biodiversity and Protected Area Management (BIOPAMA) programme is announcing a series of technical workshops in the Caribbean aimed at equipping protected areas management professionals with the tools and skills to contribute in a meaningful way to the database of The Caribbean Protected Areas Gateway (The Caribbean Gateway).

The first of these workshops began in The Bahamas on September 7 and will run until September 11, 2015, in collaboration with the National Forestry Unit in The Ministry of Environment and Housing.

The Caribbean Gateway is hosted by BIOPAMA partner, The Centre of Resource Management and Environmental Studies at The University of the West Indies, Cave Hill in Barbados. It will maintain a Caribbean Reference Information System (RIS) https://caribbean-rris.biopama.org – an online access point to data and tools for analysis for biodiversity and protected area management.

As such, participants in the Bahamas workshop have been introduced to the Caribbean RIS and given the opportunity to explore the site. They were also being encouraged to contribute their protected areas-related data and information in an effort to populate the RIS with national generated content.

Participants were re-introduced to Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software and Geographic Positioning Systems (GPS) devices; conduct field exercises to map proposed protected areas sites; learn about different Database Management Systems; create and design geodatabases; create data through digitization of georeferenced images; process and analyze data for management decisions; and ground-truth the created datasets.

Jason Williams, Technical Officer for the BIOPAMA Programme in the Caribbean said the main objective of this workshop, and the others in the series, is to assist the participating countries in building in-country capacity for and developing a systematic approach to collecting and managing biodiversity and protected areas-related data and information. The other territories earmarked for such workshops over the coming months are Antigua and Barbuda, Belize, Grenada and Jamaica.

BIOPAMA is implemented in the Caribbean by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) in collaboration with the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission and regional partners, and is funded by the 10th European Development Fund of the European Union at the initiative of the ACP Group of States.