Wednesday, October 31, 2012

The Water and Land Ressource Center is about to launch a new database for Ethiopia


The Water and Land Resource Center in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, is a 1 year old independent institute affiliated to Addis Ababa University, in close collaboration with the ministry of agriculture and the ministry of water and energy. The Resource Centre is supported  by the Swiss Development Cooperation (SDC), capitalizing on the 30 years of hydro-sedimentology data collected in 7 smaller watersheds in Ethiopia (one in Eritrea) by Professor Hans Hurni and colleagues from the university of Bern, Switzerland.  

Prof. Hans Hurni (University of Bern, Switzerland) and Dr. Gete Zeleke, director of the Resource Center

The objectives of the center are much broader than just data management. It has four components:
1. Establishing an open access and modern resource database and information management system.
2. Establishing learning watersheds to demonstrate  sustainable water and land  management by using combined efforts of research and development actions.
3. A collection of hydro-sedimentology and land management data observed in observatories and learning watersheds.
4. Improved capacities at all levels involved in water and land management.

In this context of database and information system management, the center is about to launch a new database on land and water management, called WALRIS (Water and Land Resources Information System) . It is a web based database which initially will allow to consult, visualize and use the 30 years of data generated by Center for Development and Environment of University of Bern in collaboration with the Ethiopian Ministry of Agriculture and Agriculture Research Institutes at different levels. It is also planning to  gradually make non-commercial and openly available spatial and non-spatial data from the ministry of agriculture, the ministry of water and energy and from other research and academic institutes available. 

The following movie shows how the geo-database will work.  


The center  has been organizing  itself  since mid-2011  as part of the phase one of the project. A stakeholder meeting took place this week to plan phase II. In this phase, the CGIAR has been recognized as a key partner to link up with. IWMI is already in discussion to discover where the synergies are, both in data collection and sharing. There is definitely scope for other CGIAR centers to join the effort on land and water management and make use of the web-based GIS platform to make our data better accessible to others. 

You can find more information about the center under : http://wlrc-eth.org/
and feel free to contact Dr. Gete Zeleke for discussing potential collaborations with the CGIAR :

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