Project Title: GIS Mapping of Karachi coast & GIS based analysis of marine turtle habitat: Sandspit/Hawksbay Eco-system
Year: 2009-10
Funding Agency: World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF)
Brief Description:The project focused in general on GIS based documentation of Karachi coast for facilitating future policy making, planning and conservation. This would also benefit the sensitive ecology along the Karachi coast, the local community, the land owning agencies and the public at large. The project is addressed all these issues through the use of an emergent technology that has revolutionized sea turtle research. Geographic Information System (GIS) provides a tool with the potential to perform powerful spatial data analyses for long term monitoring of wildlife habitats including sea turtle nesting sites. The project output includes the General mapping of the Karachi, the identification and analysis of causes and locations of hindrances to turtle nesting and the design of a comprehensive lobbying/awareness raising campaign aimed at creating the legislative and institutional space for implementation. The GIS Map will serve long term purposes and resource as it can be used as a planning and conservation tool for organizations like the Sindh Wildlife Department and WWF Pakistan on a continuous basis for updating, storage and retrieval of data and modeling different planning and management scenarios. On 22nd June, 2012 the project was awarded the ‘Indus Conservation Award’ by the Technical Committee of the Partnership Fund for best performance among the funded projects.
