Spying On Central America

In July 2004, construction began on a central data storage facility in Panama. In addition to being the information warehouse for the project, the Panama facility is a kind of "situation room" - a "mission control" for monitoring the health and condition of rain forests, croplands, rivers, and coastal waters throughout Central America. USAID is funding the development of this facility, as well as six smaller facilities in each of the other Central American countries: Belize, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, and El Salvador. These smaller national centers will be staffed by experts with direct access to the central database for helping address the environmental issues in their own countries.

Central America is a region with a great richness and diversity of tropical wildlife: though it only constitutes roughly 1% of the planet's surface, the region is home to about 7% of all land-dwelling species. The region is also home to a rapidly growing and widely impoverished human population. Serving the needs of the people without bankrupting the natural resources on which they depend is an enormous challenge to political decision makers.

This photo was taken in Petén, Guatemala, by Daniel Irwin. Much of Central America's rich biodiversity in is being destroyed by "slash and burn" agriculture.

It was local decision makers who came up with the idea for this Web-portal project, explains Irwin. The impetus came from an intergovernmental organization called CCAD (a Spanish acronym meaning "Central American Commission of Environment and Development"), which combines and coordinates the efforts of the seven Central American countries' ministries of the environment. Regional treaties charge the CCAD with the task of promoting environmental protection and sustainable development throughout the region. This new Web portal is one tool they sought to help them in their work.

"We're not telling the Central Americans what needs to be done," says Irwin. "Rather we're trying to listen and develop products and tools based on their needs. It is a demand-driven process."

Once development of the system is finished and local experts have been sufficiently trained, control and operation of the system will be turned over to the local environmental authorities, though NASA will remain available to them for technical support.

Meanwhile, anyone with an Internet connection can visit. At the portal you can see plumes from fires and watch rain clouds drift by. Eventually, when the site is complete, you can hop aboard a virtual plane and fly up and down the long Central American coast - just like a high-level environmental minister. As Irwin says, in some ways, it's better than the real thing.