The need of greater transparency combined with the avoidance of a repeated duplication of efforts in the fields of the international planning of Research and Development Projects within the global tropical forest R&D-Community and the loss of internal "grey" project knowledge, leads to the proposal of a Project-Information-Management.
Internationally there exist a huge variety of different project-information resources which in its majority are not compatible with each other. Thus, information of complete project data sets cannot be exchanged between these information sources and is therefore not available for future planning activities of the globally operating R&D agencies. To provide, however, an overview on what is going on, in which region, and who is doing it, it is proposed to extract from these data sources some project-key-elements. This extraction will provide a first general idea of R&D activities in a specific region and on a specific theme. The overview will also help to identify "white spots" and areas of high R&D activities.
Based on a Geo-Management-System key project-information of about 1600 internationally funded R&D projects can be evaluated, e.g. by country, key words, organisation.
Key words: tropical forestry, research, information management, GIS/GMS.
Correspondence: Horst Freiberg, European Tropical Forest Research Network - ETFRN, Ellerstrasse 50, D-53119 Bonn, Germany
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