Silvio Olivieri, Vice President, Strategic Planning, Conservation International

Carly Vynne, Project Manager, Conservation Priorities, Conservation International

ABSTRACT: PRISMA is an exciting new computer tool developed by Conservation International to present and publish databases, to generate reports and training materials, and to provide information about important tropical ecosystems. PRISMA's capacity not only to publish all types of data related to a region - maps, databases, documents, images, videos, and sounds - but also to present ideas and interpretations of this data through multimedia presentations makes it a powerful tool for conservation. PRISMA'S geographic interface is based on Esri's MapObjects LT, demonstrating the power and importance of Esri's software.

Conservation International (CI), while based in Washington, DC, operates in 24 countries around the world. These countries are chosen for their tremendous biological diversity and degree of threat to their unique ecological resources. The Strategic Planning Department of CI supports our field programs in collecting, organizing, and analyzing information on biodiversity. In order to assemble this information in a comprehensive and easily accessible manner, CI developed PRISMA software. To date, four such databases have been published by CI, and several others by our partners and other interested institutions in places such as Ecuador and Brazil.

A major process that has helped to guide funding and conservation efforts within the regions where CI works is the Conservation Priority Setting Workshop (CPW). For over a decade, CI has held such workshops in order to set priorities for biodiversity conservation. To date, regions in which we have lead or helped to facilitate this process include the Amazon, the Atlantic Forest, Cerrado, and Caatinga of Brazil, Papua New Guinea, Irian Jaya, Madagascar, and West Africa. Planning efforts are currently underway for workshops to be held in the Philippines, Gulf of California, and the Guayana Shield.

The process involves a year of data gathering in which a GIS and species database are assembled. The GIS is often the first such database compiled for the region, and involves assembling existing digital information as well as digitizing hard copy maps and, with the help of local experts, updating databases. To build the species database, researchers of the project contact scientists, museums, and public and private data holding institutions to inquire as to if they will lend their data to the project. At the end of a year, once all possible data sources are either entered or referenced and a GIS database assembled, scientists gather to apply their expertise towards designating priority areas for conservation. To assist them with this effort, GIS base maps, species distributions, and level of research effort maps are generated.

The 150 or so experts who work to define priorities for their taxonomic specialty combine knowledge to integrate taxonomic priorities into a final map of priority areas for biodiversity conservation. While this is largely a biological effort, social scientists are often involved and work on such issues as protected area management, population pressure, threats from illegal hunting, and logging and mining concessions. As the experts define priority areas, they also fill out forms which capture detailed information about the species found in each area, habitat quality, threats to the resource, and key institutions, if any, working in the region.

A major goal of the CPW is to publish and disseminate the databases and expert information, which is assembled during the CPW process. CI and partner institutions work to socialize the information so that these priority areas are understood and used in defining research needs and in making planning and development decisions. Our hope is that this information is used by academics, government officials, scientists, the non-profit sector, and land use planners. In order for this comprehensive information database to be useful to the aforementioned audience, it needed to be assembled into an easily accessible format, which could handle not only documents and images, but also display GIS. Furthermore, because proprietary rights are maintained over much of the data, the source and metadata of each piece of included information needed to be attached. In the early nineties, Silvio Olivieri, CI's Vice President for Strategic Planning, began to advance on the needs and ideas of an information distribution tool and began inception of PRISMA.

The intended audience was to be as broad as possible. Our goal was not to be promoting a strategy or action plan, but rather to provide a tool that shares information which others could use to make better-informed decisions. Therefore, all levels of information needed to be accessible to individuals with a general interest in the region, to folks specifically working on conservation or development projects in the focus area. Another consideration was that in many of the places from where this database would be accessed, hook up to the internet is either non-existent or inadequate for downloading information. By placing the data on CD-ROM, which could be used by most computers and easily ported to the field, internet connection problems were eliminated.

With the goal of disseminating information about the workshop process and its results, as well as the GIS data and tables, we needed a tool that could present the results in an attractive, easy to use format, and also give the user access to data for their own analytical purposes. Essentially, we needed a tool flexible enough to clearly summarize results for a non-technical audience, but powerful enough to handle a variety of data formats. Furthermore, we wanted the non-GIS user to be able to access different layers of information, create and save map layouts, and be able to perform basic analyses on the included spatial data sets.

Because of the specific needs we had for an information dissemination tool, and the software limitations at the time, we determined that we would need to develop this product internally within CI. PRISMA was initially built based on Delphi and Paradox, as MapObjects was not yet available. Consequently, the geographic component was at this point quite weak and not well integrated with our own databases. With the arrival of MapObjects, we were able to advance the geographic interface to create an intuitive user environment, which offers many of the basic functions of ArcView.

Currently, PRISMA functions only in Windows, with a Pentium Processor (ideal) and CD-ROM. System requirements include 16 MB RAM and 8 MB of disk space. The user must modify settings in the control panel to create a screen area of at least 1024 x 768 pixels. To install PRISMA, a 'setup.exe' file is run from the main directory of the CD-ROM. A few program files are then installed on the users hard drive while most remain on the CD-ROM. Changes in map compositions may be saved to the users hard drive.

The various interfaces of PRISMA provide the tool with flexibility in how it may be used. For the person interested in an overview of the process, the best place to start is in the Knowledge Interface. Here, the user may view documents, summaries, images, videos, as well as listen to sounds from the region of focus. Files may be saved to the user's hard drive or printed directly for inclusion in reports or other presentations. Each document has an associated metadata file with copyright and other pertinent information.

For the non-GIS user who would like the ability to view, perform simple analysis, or print maps of their focus region, a Geographic Interface is included. Shapefiles are supported in a format that looks and performs like a "pared-down" ArcView program.

Unique layouts and views may be saved on the users hard drive and all map compositions may also be exported in various raster or vector formats.

For the user who would like direct access to the database's map compositions, photos, videos, sounds, or documents, there is an Information Interface. From a tabbed dialogue box, the user may open, print, save, or access metadata for any of the listed files.

PRISMA has been used primarily by Conservation International to publish the results of the Conservation Priority-Setting Workshops. In the case of West Africa and the Philippines, PRISMA was used during the pre-workshop phase so that scientists could review the data and make recommendations for updates to be made prior to the workshop. In the spring of 1999, we published the results of a protected areas of the Amazon study (SURAPA). CI staff has also trained outside institutions in PRISMA development. This has resulted in several locally built information systems such as Parque Nacional Podocarpus, an information system on an Ecuadorian Park designed to improve management and identify gaps in information. Currently, work is underway by

the Brazilian government's corridor project, Probio, to design their information system using PRISMA. Plans are also moving forward within CI to publish the results of our rapid assessment surveys in PRISMA format.

To provide you with a better understanding of how PRISMA looks and works, I will now demonstrate the software. This example contains the results of the Irian Jaya Biodiversity Conservation Priority-Setting Workshop, held from 7-12 January, 1997, in Biak, Irian Jaya, Indonesia.

When PRISMA is opened, an introductory title page is displayed and the user is automatically entered in the Knowledge Interface. From the file menu, the user may change the language of both the program display toolbar and menus, which are translated from English into French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Indonesian Bahasa. The entire program, including buttons, documents, and the map interface, will run in any language into which the developer translates these files.

The user maneuvers through the Knowledge Interface using the large buttons. In this case, the first layer of choices include an overview of PRISMA capabilities, general information about the workshop process, workshop results, and a discussion of the findings and recommendations. By clicking on a button, the user will then arrive either at a script, containing documents, images, sounds, videos, and/or tables or another main page with sub-categories. For example, if the user chose General Information, the next selection of choices would be Biodiversity in Irian Jaya, Potential Threats to Biodiversity, or the Priority-Setting Process. Once inside a script, the user may forward to the next page, return to previous, or replay the page by using the toolbar at the bottom of the screen. Images and tables may be resized or exported.

Should the user want to access these tables without having to maneuver through the Knowledge Interface, one could move straight to the Information Interface. Here, one can view the file or listen to a sound, or simply view the metadata for the particular file of interest. Metadata includes a description, specifications, copyright information, and a link to a contact database. The contact database holds all of the information for the source person or institution.

The Geographic Interface allows for map display and query. Like in ArcView, various themes may be turned on or off. A legend, which may be edited, appears below. When the theme is highlighted, the information tool may be used to find related documents. The query tool allows the user to ask and answer basic questions about the shapefiles. It is possible to save various compositions the user may create, export these in a variety of file formats, and save them to one's hard drive.

PRISMA has proven to be effective at organizing and disseminating information from Priority-Setting Workshops, and we feel that it's utility could benefit other groups attempting to disseminate similar types of data.

We realize, however, that while PRISMA was cutting edge for its time, improved technologies will now allow us to make its utility even greater and development less cumbersome. One of the main shortfalls of the product is that it is currently difficult to develop, therefore making training of field staff time consuming and expensive.

To improve upon the capacity of this product, we are hoping to develop a version 3, which may be based on Esri's ArcExplorer and html. The goal of doing this is to improve the ease of utility of PRISMA while maintaining the software's capability to combine the variety of data sets into one attractive and compact format. Additional features that may be included are an increased analytical capability in the GIS component, a more intuitive, possibly html-based Knowledge Interface, and a developer-friendly package intended for design in the field.