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Interrain Pacific: Land and sea weave a coherent whole along North America's leading edge, a region whose heart is the coastal temperate rain forest stretching from Alaska to northern California. The communities of this bioregion, though endowed with productive lands and waters that have supported resource-based livelihoods for generations, struggle today with the consequences of isolation from markets and decision making centers. In too many cases, environmental and economic decline have been the unfortunate results. Communities throughout the region, though distinct, share challenges that spring from common roots. To date, efforts to surmount them have failed to recognize the critical links between healthy ecosystems, viable economies, and thriving communities. Local knowledge has rarely been combined with available resources in effective collaboration.
Interrain Pacific was created to help communities address these challenges. Combining the public-access philosophy pioneered by Pacific GIS with Ecotrust's conservation-based development mission, Interrain Pacific is an information access organization established to promote conservation-based development by enhancing understanding of social and ecological patterns of change. Interrain Pacific has three objectives:
These objectives form four core programs:
Capacity
Interrain Pacific provides training and technical support to conservation
organizations in the use of computer-based geographic information systems
(GIS) to retrieve and understand information about their local ecosystem.
Training tasks include an assessment of hardware and software needs, training
workshops, and ongoing database management and technical support.
Content
In partnership with communities, we are building an information system
that incorporates biophysical, social, economic, and cultural databases
and summarizes information at local and bioregional scales; we will work
with them to develop new tools to uncover, understand, and communicate
the region's ecological resilience and economic opportunities.
Connectivity
We help communities that have lacked access to electronic communications
to connect to the internet, and to use this access to exchange their knowledge
and experience of local resources with regional researchers.
Information Products
We turn data into knowledge through an array of products including
maps, atlases, state-of-the-ecosystem reports, CD-ROMs, posters, peer-reviewed
publications, and educational materials.
Interrain Pacific is part of Ecotrust. For more information, see about Inforain.