ENVIS Newsletter

- 1 - Vol.2, No.3, 2006

SSaalliimm AAllii CCeennttrree FFoorr OOrrnniitthhoollooggyy && NNaattuurraall HHiissttoorryy

Wetland Informatics

Wetland Ecosystem Newsletter 2006

Introduction The Salim Ali Centre for Ornithology and Natural History (SACON) brings out the second issue of SAROVAR SAURABH, an ENVIS Newsletter on wetland ecosystems, sponsored by the Ministry of Environment and Forests, Govt. of India. The major goal of the Newsletter is to share information about wetlands with various users and, to highlight conservation issues of relevance to wetland community of professionals, managers, environmentalists and other stakeholders. This section of the newsletter deals with use of a novel class of ICT tools to publish wetland related information on the Internet. These tools are being extensively used in the ENVIS website on wetland ecosystem successfully for the last one and half years. The use of these tools has evolved over this period and is documented for the first time and illustrated. It is again hoped that stakeholders in wetland conservation and all other ENVIS centres can make use of these tools effectively to communicate, educate and create public awareness of their own subject areas. To make this effort worth while the editorial team of SARVAR SAURABH seeks active participation of its readers in terms of providing information, news, views, photographs and articles on issues of wetland conservation. We welcome your feedback on the Newsletter and its contents.

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Wetland Informatics The following features were developed for Wetland Informatics. 1. Use of DjVu Technology in development of Web Atlases on Mangrove ecosystem DjVu technology from lizardtech (http://www.lizrdtech.com) is used for developeing the Web atlases on mangrove ecosystem. For viewing web atlases, user need to install DjVu plug in which is available on lizardtech website. The web atlases are best for those having low-speed internet connections for quick access. Here user can save the web atlases on desktop or can take print of it.

1. DjVu is faster, smaller and clearer solution for maps / documents on the Web 2. Powerful tool for geographic data, document management, and web distribution 3. Converts any scanned paper document, catalog or book into super-small, high-quality

images that can be instantly transmitted and viewed by anyone via a standard Web browser

4. As a result, users can efficiently scan, store, download and email crucial documents via corporate intranets or the Internet 150 times faster than Adobe¨ PDF and 20 times faster than JPEG or GIF

5. DjVu files can be panned, enlarged or reduced smoothly in real-time 66.. DjVu is also the ideal format for the growing e-book marketplace

The following web atlases are available in the DjVu format

• Tamil Nadu mangrove atlas • Andhra Pradesh mangrove atlas • Orissa mangrove state

There is also Mangroves of India: State-of-the-art report available in the Djvu format.

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2. User Guides As the Wetlands of India website is progressing towards the stability, there was need to develop the user guides to help out the users while accessing the website. There many features available on Wetlands of India website such as DjVu technology, wetland databases, interactive maps using ALOV etc which were needing user guides to use those techniques. In 2004-2005, website development was going on using different technology while in 2005-2006 special attention was given on develop user guides. Following user guides were developed and made available to related techniques for ease of user. 2.1 User guide on “How to use DjVu toolbar?” DjVu browser technology has been used extensively on Wetlands of India website. To make the user familiar with DjVu toolbar, user guide has been developed and made available on the website.

UUsseerr gguuiiddee oonn ““HHooww ttoo uussee DDjjVVuu ttoooollbbaarr??””

All the above metioned atlases, simple maps on Wetlands of india and prioritized maps on inland wetlands of India are present in the DjVu format. To view the atlases or maps, it requires the free DjVu browser plug-in available from www.lizardtech.com or click here for DjVu plug-in. After clicking the above links for mangroves atlases, following toolbar will be seen which has multiple options.

Uisng this toolbar, you can save the atlases or maps on your machine or can take print of the same. It also provides the zoom in , zoom out and pan option for better viewing the maps included in the atlas. You can also use the zoom option to zoom selected area. You can also use navigation option on the toolbar for seeing next page or previous page or you can type the number of the page which you want to view. There is also a option for searching text in the atlas or maps.

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2.2 User guide on “How to access Wetland Databases in the website?”

HHooww ttoo aacccceessss ddaattaabbaasseess iinn tthhee wweebbssiittee??

1. Species inventory on Angiosperms, Fishes and Birds in India Database on Species Inventory on Angiosperms, Fishes and Birds in India was developed using Jakarta Taglib for front-end development and Mysql database as back-end for storing the data. The interface provides easy search facility and which results in displaying scientific names and Google images link so that user can have photographic view for the particular species. Species search for angiosperms, Freshwater Fishes and Birds can be done by "Contains"- specific word in the scientific name, or by "Begins with"- specific letter or word by which scientific name starts, or by "ends with"- specific letter or word by which scientific name ends, or by "Is" - complete scientific name.

2. Bibliography database related to wetlands Database on bibliography was developed using Jakarta Taglib for front-end and Mysql for back-end for storing bibliographic data. The interface provide easy search with two-combo box, first combo box includes keywords, author and year while second contains journals, thesis, reports and a textbox for entering search word. This interface provides various combinations, which facilitates easy searching for bibliographic data. This database contains 4460 records which covers scientific papers from the journals such as Journal of Bombay Natural History Society,Forktail, Newsletters for Bird Watchers,Journal of Ecological Society. Hornbill and from grey literatures such as thesis, report and unpublished thesis and manuscriptsetc.

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2.3 User guide on “Browsing Interactive Map on wetland Inventory of India”

DDeemmoonnssttrraattiioonn ffoorr BBrroowwssiinngg IInntteerraaccttiivvee MMaapp oonn WWeettllaannddss IInnvveennttoorryy ooff IInnddiiaa

1. Click on the link "Interactive Map for Wetland Inventory of India". Map will

open showing the Indian states.

2. Use option to zoom any particular area on the map. For this click button and then drag the box on any desired part of the map.

3. Other layers such as road, rail, location, drainage will appear on the map on further zoom.

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4. You can use the button to pan other areas on the map. 5. You can also use the tools listed above such as select option for identifying the

information for a particular layer.

6. Activate the layer wetlands by clicking its name and then use option to search the data at taluk (smallest administrative unit) level. Enter the taluk name

in the textbox and then hit the button and result will be displayed in the form of table as below.

7. Use tool to measure the distance between any pair of objects on the map. The distance for each line segment as well as for the total line appears above the

map. Double-click to end the line and click the tool on the toolbar to remove the measure line on the map.

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8. Click on and options to generate an on screen report for features such as latitude, longitude, area, perimeter, type, village and others.

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3. Updates on Wetland Information Network: Map Portal In the simple maps using DjVu Browser Technology from lizardtech (http://www.lizrdtech.com) section of Map Portal on wetlands, prioritized maps on Inland Wetlands of India were added.

Prioritized Inland Wetland Map of Andhra Pradesh

Table showing the biodiversity in the Prioritized Inland Wetland of Andhra Pradesh

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4. About “This Website” menu section of the website One more menu was added to the Wetlands of India website named “this Website”. The purpose behind is to provide the site structure to the user so one can surf the website easily. This section also gives information on accessibility and usability of the website. Following are the submenus were used under “This website” menu section.

4.1 How to use this website:

This sub-menu explains how to use the website of wetlands of India. In this section menus structure for Wetlands of India has been provided in two format such table and diagrammatic flowchart for better surfing of the website. This explains about various techniques being used such as DjVu browser plug-in, interactive maps using ALOV etc on the website. It also provides information on to how to use the wetland databases and regional language interface available on the website.

1. Home 2. SACON

Objectives Staff Copyright Contact Us

3. ENVIS ENVIS Centres

4. Wetlands Guidelines National Sites Ramsar Sites Photo gallery Map Portal Wetlands Reports Glossary Links Coastal Wetlands Mangroves

5. Biodiversity Endemics RET Prioritization Species Inventory

6. Publications Newsletters Reports Books Abstracts Monographs

7. CEPA 8. National Reports 9. Blog 10. This Website

Menu Structure for Wetlands of India Website

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Diagrammatic flow chart for wetlands of India Website

4.2 Accessibility:

Website accessibility refers to the ability of different forms of browsing technologies to effectively view the content on a website. The website has been designed for maximum accessibility. It seeks to accommodate screen resolutions of 1024 x 768 and higher. It can be viwed in Internet explorer, Mozilla, Deepnet explorer etc but best viewed in Internet explorer 5.5 or more. The website has been designed to be as accessible as possible through the following features:

• Use of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) • Page content flows logically. • Client side scripts are used minimally on the website • All text uses relative font sizes • Colors selected to provide considerable contrast • All pages adhere to World Wide Web. • We have tried to be clear and concise with text

4.3 Usability:

Usability refers to how easy it is to navigate the website and find the information you are looking for. In order to test the usability of this website, we did a number of usability tests, which provided a great deal of useful feedback which was incorporated in the structure, layout and design of this site. The following usability features can be found on this site:

• Minimum number of top-level links • No prior knowledge about the site structure is required to navigate the site • All pages contain "breadcrumbs" that show the path of navigation

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• Site map has been provided • All pages contain titles and meta descriptions to allow easier understanding of

search results • Colors, fonts, etc. assist the user with navigation and finding important

information within a page

4.4 Site credits:

This gives the information about the personnel involved in the development of Wetlands of India website

4.5 Web Statistics:

Web Stat Software called “Webalizer Version 2.01 “ is used to track the number of visitors to the Web site. It includes information such as hits, page views, bandwidth used, and other useful information

5. Updates on Regional Language Interface Development of Wetlands of India website into Hindi language was done by using Microsoft’s WEFT (Web Embedding Fonts Tool) software which is available freely. The font used was Kruti- Dev for Hindi language, which left many errors behind and was not suitable for web purpose. We have used currently Baraha font, which suit very well for web. We made updated version of Hindi Wetlands of India using Baraha font. Baraha is a word processing application for creating documents in Indian languages. It is developed with an intention to provide free software to enable and encourage Indians use their native languages on the computers. Baraha can be effectively used for creating documents, sending emails and publishing web pages. Baraha 7.0 supports Kannada, Devanagari, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Gujarati, Gurumukhi, Bengali, and Oriya scripts.

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6. Other improvements on Wetlands of India website There were some improvements made on the Wetlands of India website as follows. The front-end interface for various sections has been improved by doing web designing. The following screen shots shows the web designing improvement for related section.

Improved interface for Feedback

Improved interface for sign up for updates on Wetlands of India

The information on Forest Wetlands was added under Wetlands menu. Also new menu was created named as “CEPA” meaning Communication, Education and Public awareness in conserving the wetlands and ultimately biodiversity. This two sections are under progress. Even more records were added to the Wetland databases such as Species Inventory database on angiosperms, birds and fishes in India and bibliographic database. There is always updating going on for blog section of the Wetlands of India.

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7. Web Statistics:

The following table and graph summarizes the usages of websites during 2006-2007 by users throughout the world.

Wetlands of India (Summary by Month) Daily Avg Monthly Totals

Month Hits Files Pages Visits Sites KBytes Visits Pages Files Hits

Feb 2007 601 416 307 74 554 0 747 3071 4163 6011Jan 2007 444 311 245 66 1074 0 2066 7607 9654 13780Dec 2006 314 206 184 69 825 0 2145 5707 6401 9734Nov 2006 552 435 387 79 661 0 1825 8917 10010 12700Oct 2006 254 142 118 41 605 0 990 2852 3421 6106Sep 2006 288 166 127 60 1012 0 1820 3814 4996 8654Aug 2006 302 160 134 54 1111 0 1694 4154 4990 9369Jul 2006 288 177 137 61 745 0 1893 4271 5506 8928Jun 2006 559 151 146 87 783 0 2622 4405 4548 16788May 2006 567 238 225 74 784 0 2324 6976 7403 17585Apr 2006 617 488 480 123 1130 0 3703 14403 14645 18523Mar 2006 643 423 417 72 840 0 2248 12928 13123 19961Totals 0 24077 79105 88860 148139

Countrywide usages for April 2006 Countrywide usages for January 2007

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Acknowledgment We are extremely grateful to Director, ENVIS, Ministry of Environment & Forests, Dr. D. Bandopadhaya for kindly supporting the program. We also thank Dr. C Annadurai for his help. We would like to thank Dr. V. Selvam MSSRF, Chennai. Dr. S. Subrahmanyam for providing inputs to ENVIS Newsletter.

ISSN 0972-3153 SAROVAR SAURABH

ENVIS NEWSLETTER on Wetland Ecosystem

Editors S. Narendra Prasad

Lalitha Vijayan P. A. Azeez, Director Incharge

ENVIS Team Chiranjibi Pattanaik Santosh Gaikwad

Published by Environmental Information System (ENVIS) Centre

Salim Ali Centre for Ornithology & Natural History (SACON), Anaikatty - 641 108. Coimbatore (TN), India.

Sponsored by

ENVIS, Ministry of Environment & Forests, Government of India, New Delhi.

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