Kathmandu-
International Union for Conservation of Nature Nepal (IUCN) has organized progress review and planning meeting with it’s partners on 6th April 2018. The JaibikMap project’s Principal Investigator Dr. Menaka Panta has updated the project partners who are USAID, Tribhuvan University Central Department of Botany (TU/CBD), Katmandu living labs(KLL) and Department of National Park and Wildlife Conservation(DNPWC), first year progress of expected outputs of the JaibikMap project and also share the preliminary outputs among other stakeholders and conservation partners like SERVER_ICIMOD, Hariyo Ban Program and other institutions as well.
The JaibikMap: Nepal’s biodiversity and climate change tool for the future project which begun in December 2016. The project is led by the IUCN Nepal with the financial support of USAID and partnership with MOEF/DNPWC, CBD/TU, KLL, and Map of Life (US based partner).
The main aim of JaibikMap research is to focus on the nexus of data management, climate change and biodiversity in Nepal. Similarly, it’s objective is to design and create an interactive, open data, free web-based mapping tool that contains detailed data of mammalian species, to address conservation and development challenges; conduct a nation wide study of forest change under different climate change scenarios and apply findings to species distribution models predicting shifts in habitat.
Finally, the project will develop a mobile application that can allow anyone to upload photos and GPS coordinates to the JaibikMap repository taken during opportunistic sightings of mammal species.
According to Dr. Panta, out of 208 Red List mammalian species found in Nepal only 73 species has been taken into consideration to modeling in JaibikMap due to data deficiency. In the meantime, project has been produced the suitable habitat area of 73 species under current and future scenarios and its profiling and updated the species range maps as well.
Furthermore; this project will address two mutually reinforcing gaps which currently pose development challenges in conservation sector of Nepal, i.e Challenges of accessibility, visualization and sharing of data relevent to conservationists and development planners. Challenges to gaining an understanding the effects of climate change on forest composition nationally and the subsequent impacts of changes on selected mammal and plant species.
Therefore, the project output will help and ensure to establish a visual representation of the abundance, status and distribution, and habitat requirements of mammal species occurring in Nepal. It will also help to understand and gain knowledge on species habitat and tree line shift in light of climate change as well.
