NATURE WORLDWIDE

NATURE WORLDWIDE is the title of the website http://www.birdlist.org, the official website of the World Institute for Conservation and Environment, WICE.

I got the ideas about the website during a training course on websites in 1995, when my webdesign instructor showed some websites that had some of the highest rankings on the internet, and I thought by myself, "How can we use the net to promote conservation? What would appeal to a large audience that could promote the interest in nature and nature conservation? Is there anything that people would want to find out about nature and that could stimulate their interest in helping to protect nature in a way that would be beneficial to themselves?

I was particularly concerned about visitation to national parks and nature reserves in developing countries. Only a few countries (at the time Costa Rica, Ecuador, Kenia and South Africa) were enjoying significant visitation, but even in those countries, only a few areas enjoyed more than 100,000 visitors per year.

Tourist operators were often sending their visitors to commercial places with which they had a particular deal, and most ecoturisme would bypass the majority of the protected areas. Having experimented with an ecotourims lodge in a national park, the Cuyabeno Lodge http://www.cuyabenolodge.com, I knew that most birdwatchers wanted the species list of the country before they would go on a trip, and birdwatchers are among the most adventurous ecotourists, often opening new destinations. So the idea was born to create a website that would provide a checklist of the birds of each country of the world. So WICE (http://www.wice.ws)started hiring young biologists in developing countries and biology students in the USA to analyze official checklists when available and analyze birding guides for all those numerous countries that did not or had not published an official birdlist. Millions of data were entered into what at the time was the largest database on bird presence for the entire world.

Our site was unique in many ways. First of all the major birding sites like "Birdlinks of the World", http://www.bsc-eoc.org/ and http://www.camacdonald.com/ listed country lists from a variety of links on the internet. Nobody however had taken the trouble of doing serious research in actually entering vast amounts of data into a database. It is a bit sad to now see that particularly Avibase has later copied our idea and now pretends to be the avibase . Well, anyway, that is the web. While birds no longer is unique, our site remains unique: We also list the protected areas of all the countries (http://www.nationalparks-worldwide.info), as well as the lists of mammals. For the latter, most continents are fairly well covered, but so far we have not done well in finding exhaustive mammal guides for most countries in Azia and there our lists are primarily limited to the macro mammals. But one day we will get there!

When our website is complete a few years down the road, you will find for every country of the world the protected areas, birds, mammals and possibly herpetofauno in one single website, as well as a vast resource of management tools and manuals for national parks, nature reserves and other protected areas. Ultimately it is our intention to provide you with info on each protected area, such as highlights, how to get there, options for staying, etc.

As WICE continuously works at methods for improving protected areas management, we also are sharing lots of tools and docuement on our websites, such as on monitoring (http://www.monitoring-nature.info), completely free GIS tools (http://www.ilwis.org), the Minimum Conservation System (MICOSYS) programme to analyse the representativeness, prioritize among protected areas and to assess staffing and financing needs.

Ultimately, we put the different themes in an integrated system of domains that are designed and linked in such a way that one barely notices the transfer from one domain to the next. These are our domains:

http://www.adopt-a-ranger.org

http://www.nature-worldwide.info

http://www.birdlist.org

http://www.nationalparks-worldwide.info

http://www.mammals-worldwide.info

http://www.monitoring-nature.info

http://www.ecosystems.ws

Go to any of them and from there you will find your way to the different themes of your interest. We have more than 2000 pages of information.