Two important activities of the biodiversity sector are surveying the wildlife of the valley and habitat mapping. These two activities should be carried out side by side, however this is not always possible due to the two different skills required to complete both.

In PCDP, GIS mapping is carried out using ArcView software that is being used under the auspices of WWF Pakistan. ArcView is software that allows the user to view Rasta based images and also to formulate map queries. WWF Pakistan also uses ArcInfo for analyzing and processing information.

For collecting wildlife data, the project relies on the biologists, who are usually more interested in micro-habitats rather than where they are on the map. Of course knowing what is where is important but linking this knowledge to a GIS database is sometimes a technical job that requires

PCDP has used the services WWF GIS Lab in the past as the focal point for all GIS based activities such as image processing, ground-truthing and training and again the lab was used to assist in

During June 2003, staff of BDC (Rab Nawaz and Muhammad Ayaz) and Salman Ashraf from WWF GIS lab started the ominous task of putting wildlife data onto the ArcView maps. Data almost a decade old was sorted through and entered onto a database and then portrayed onto an ArcView map view.

This exercise required the team to go through piles of paperwork and old reports to extract information that was then checked, re-checked and sometimes verified by the authors of the reports.

The result was a distribution map of all the pheasant’s species that are found in Palas Valley. However, mapping them on AcrView gives the ability to ask map queries e.g. all tragopans observed all north-facing slopes with medium conifer cover at 2800 metersASL. The list of map queries that are possible are numerous and the main application of this software is to start to test hypothesis that we have about tragopans, i.e. they inhabit the cooler aspects of the valley in summer and the warmer aspects in summer.

The exercise started with pheasant species but will be extended to first the endemic bird species and endangered mammals and then ultimately the majority of the species that can be found in the valley. Below are some screen captures of the exercise

Maps	Titles
	Distribution of western tragopan in Palas valley
	Database for Himalayan Monal pheasant data
	Distribution of Himalayan Monal pheasant in Palas valley
	3-D image of Himalayan Monal distribution in Palas Valley

By Rab Nawaz PO Biodiversity Conservation, PCDP