Last Updated: August 17th, 2020

Background

The Madagascar Office National pour l’Environnement (ONE) is the national institution that weights environmental investments through scientific analysis. The organization also manages the country’s environmental information system.  It focuses on key species in the country. Lemurs are one of the flagship species of Madagascar which has the highest conservation priority. There are 15 genera, 97 species, 101 taxa with sub-species that are all endemics and 41% of them are threatened: 8 critically endangered, 18 endangered, 15 vulnerable, 42 data deficient, with 24 being described just recently. Unfortunately, there is no available satisfactory database to monitor the distribution, threat status, habitat requirements, and changes to habitat for these species.

Key Objectives and Activities

Consideration of biodiversity is essential for environmental assessment and lemur protection. Biodiversity (species and ecosystem) and trends need to be evaluated via rigorous scientific assessments, in order to see the impact of environmental investment, decisions to mitigate negative impacts, and to develop sustainable solutions.

The database created will be a tool for decision making for national environmental investments, monitoring of species status, and the ultimate conservation of the lemur population. In particular, information will be gathered to protect those lemur species most vulnerable to extinction. It will also provide a basis for determining the value of lemurs relative to tourism in balance with other land uses and values.

Planned Outputs and Outcomes

To ensure lemur conservation, habitat data will be collected and analyzed. This will help identify missing data gaps in the lemur species and species distribution and provide valuable information about the prevalence current habitat threats, especially by mining and deforestation. This will be accomplished through collection of overall data on lemur threat status, diversity, distribution, and species characteristics, as well as through targeted sampling of lemur populations in areas where there are ongoing threats to the population.

Primary Software Platforms

The development language for the atlas portal is the PHP 5.3.3 version.  The target database is implemented on a POSTGRES v8.4.4 / POSTGIS v1.5. The Geometry is stored in PG GEOMETRY Format. The map data are stored in the reference system “Laborde grid approximation” (Antananarivo – Paris) EPSG: 29702 and WGS84 – EPSG 4326.