Wet Area Mapping by The Forest Watershed Research Center - UNiversity of New Brunswick

http://watershed.for.unb.ca/international

From time to time, the FWRCgets requests to provide individuals or organizations outside Canada with high-resolution flow-channel, wet-area and cartographic depth-to-water maps. In this way, the Center produced maps for all of Maine, Vermont, Hawaii, and other locations in the USA. Lately, it has also derived DTW index maps for all of Belize, Haiti, and parts in Romania/ Bulgaria, Slovenia, Uruguay, Germany and Malaysia. These efforts are generally based on local DEM data, or - if such are not available - on downloadable NASA STRM or ASTER DEM data. The FWRC will display the maps for these areas in the near future, with the DTW maps for Haiti, Belize, and small sectors in Uruguay and Germany already present. For actual GIS coverage and data layers, check our international listings. Please contact FWRC when information about details is wanted.

lacandon cultural heritage project

The Lacandon Cultural Heritage project http://web.uvic.ca/lacandon/ (University of Victoria)  documents the language and culture of the northern Lacandones, who live in the Selva Lacandona of Chiapas, Mexico. It was carried out under the purview of the DOBES (Dokumentation Bedrohter Sprachen [documentation of endangered languages]) and the VolkswagenStiftung endangered language documentation program between 2002 and 2006.

The Lacandones are a Mayan people and the descendents of "Lacandon" fugitives who fled from the Guatemala Petén and the Yucatan peninsula in the later 18th and early 19th centuries. Lacandon is one of four Yucatecan (Mayan) languages. The Lacandon language is far closer than its sister languages -- Itzáj, Mopán, and Yucatec-- to the original Classic Maya, because the Lacandones were not subjected to centuries of political, cultural, religious, or linguistic domination by either the Colonial Spaniards or the Mexican State.

The northern Lacandones are the focus of the documentation project, because, unlike their southern counterparts, who abandoned their traditional religion six decades ago, the northern Lacandones resisted all missionary attempts to convert them to Christianity and so preserved much of the ancient Maya religion and customs well into the 20th century. Documentation of what remains of their cultural heritage, particularly their ecological knowledge, has become urgent.

The Lacandon Cultural Heritage corpus contains a variety of media, including 25 hours of audio-video recordings and transcribed texts, a trilingual (Lacandon/Spanish/English) field dictionary, and an ethnobiological inventory of Lacandon folk terms for the flora and fauna of the Selva Lacandona. It also contains a descriptive component of the language and culture, including a language sketch of northern Lacandon, and ethnographic, social, historical and geographic information. All the data have been incorporated into a browsable corpus archived at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, The Netherlands. In addition to the archive, the corpus will be available on DVD and the internet. Electronic and print versions of the ethnobiological inventory are also envisioned.

Research Team

Suzanne Cook: Principal Investigator, Dept. of Linguistics, University of Victoria
http://web.uvic.ca/ling/faculty/cook.htm

Barry Carlson: Principal Investigator, Dept. of Linguistics, University of Victoria
http://web.uvic.ca/ling/faculty/carlson.htm

Penelope Brown Max:  Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, The Netherlands
http://www.mpi.nl/people/brown-penelope

Research assistants
http://web.uvic.ca/lacandon/assistants.htm

Bolivian specialization in Community Economic Development

This project aims to establish a practical university-based training program in Community Economic Development (CED) in Bolivia, adapting a curriculum from Mexico to the Bolivian context. The project is a partnership between the Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar (UASB) in Bolivia and the Centre for Sustainable Community Development (CSCD) at Simon Fraser University (SFU) in Canada. The project will use the CED curriculum and lessons learned from another Tier 2 project in Mexico, developed in partnership between SFU, CENDEC (a Mexican NGO) and ITESM (a Mexican university), adapted to the Bolivian challenges and realities, in collaboration with local stakeholders from Bolivia.

The importance of helping people and institutions develop the skills required to meet complex development challenges is greater than ever, as is the need to strengthen capacity-building institutions. The project will strengthen the capacity of Bolivian institutions to respond effectively to two critical development challenges in Bolivia: poverty reduction through private sector development and enhanced citizen participation. The lead partner institution will have increased capacity to deliver applied, high-quality training in CED, training that supports change in the patterns of development at the local level toward increased gender equity, sustainability, community participation, and economic opportunities. Municipalities and NGOs will benefit from building their human resources capacity by sending its employees to participate in the program, enabling them to develop more effective economic and participation projects and strategies at the community level. The project places particular emphasis on building women's leadership potential and the capacity of women's organizations.

The UASB and other Bolivian organizations consulted in the process of developing the proposal indicated that the CED training program should be oriented to people who work most directly with local-level social and economic development projects in Bolivia, namely staff of NGOs and staff and elected leaders in municipal governments. This would include people at the professional level (i.e., with undergraduate degrees, executive directors and program managers, some elected officials) and the technical level (i.e. technical training or certification, project implementation staff, elected officials, etc.)

The CED curriculum will therefore be developed with a core set of courses and assignments that result in participants receiving a "Certificate in Community Economic Development ," oriented to people with no university education but some post-secondary training. This certificate is equivalent to a non-credit, continuing education program in a Canadian university. The curriculum will further include an additional set of materials and/or a research project that result in a "Specialization in Community Economic Development " designation, a post-graduate diploma for university graduates. The core classes will have a practical focus, in which participants can bring their actual experiences, problems, and challenges to the classroom, learning from each other, and enriching the learning experience by incorporating input from a diversity of sectoral and educational backgrounds. To bring the training from the classroom into the community, the Bolivian curriculum will incorporate a "train-the-trainer" component to provide graduates with the capacity to share and pass on their learning to the people they work with, both within their workplaces and in the communities they serve.

Contact: Gretchen Hernandez, Project Coordinator (gretchen_hernandez@sfu.ca)

New Public Consortia for Metropolitan Governance, Brazil

Good metropolitan governance is essential for the improvement of settlement conditions. Metropolitan governance in Brazil, however, has not kept pace with the country's urbanization. Increasing populations, a limited capacity to provide services and utilities, and weak mechanisms for coordinating action and planning among municipalities and senior-level governments have hampered efforts to improve living conditions, especially for people living in or moving to informal urban settlements (favelas) and other precarious settlements on the peripheries of Brazil's metropolitan areas.

Brazil's Ministry of Cities and the University of British Columbia are jointly leading a four-year project to enhance metropolitan governance in Brazil by facilitating the formation of 'new public consortia'. The New Public Consortia (NPC) project will contribute to metropolitan governance in Brazil by supporting the development of innovative inter-jurisdictional structures (public consortia) for managing land use and social programmes and policies, stimulating local economies, meeting basic needs, and otherwise improving living conditions in metropolitan areas.

More information: http://www.chs.ubc.ca/consortia/index.html