4th EABRN-UNESCO Training Workshop Opened at AIR

Date：2011-04-11

The 4th EABRN-UNESCO Training Workshop on “Remote Sensing and GIS for Biosphere Reserve Management” was opened at the East Campus of the Aerospace Information Research Institute (AIR), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), on 11 April 2011. Natarajan Ishwaran, Director of the Division of Ecological and Earth Sciences, UNESCO, and Secretary of the MAB International Coordinating Council (ICC); Ramasamy Jayakumar, Program Specialist at the UNESCO Beijing Office; Robert Lee, Deputy Director of the UNESCO Jakarta Office; Wang Ding, Secretary-General of the Chinese MAB National Committee; Zhuang Yan, representative of the Bureau of International Cooperation of CAS; Wang Kanghong, Vice-President of SuperMap Software Co., Ltd; Shang Dong, Marketing Director of ERDAS Software, Leica Geosystems AG; and 22 participants from eight Asian countries were invited to attend the opening ceremony.

The ceremony was chaired by Hong Tianhua, Deputy Director and Secretary-General of the International Centre on Space Technologies for Natural and Cultural Heritage (HIST) under the auspices of UNESCO, hosted by AIR. Zhang Bing, Deputy Director of AIR, gave a welcome speech on behalf of AIR, extending a warm welcome to the participants, recognizing the important role of the training workshop to apply remote sensing and geographical information technology to biosphere protection and presenting the unique advantage of AIR in the research and application of space technologies. Wang Xinyuan, Deputy Director of HIST, outlined AIR to the participants.

Ishwaran, who came from the Paris headquarters of UNESCO to attend the opening ceremony, congratulated the program on their successful series of training workshops, expressing his thanks for the powerful support from HIST and AIR in the execution of UNESCO’s “Man and the Biosphere Program” and his expectations for the effectiveness of the training workshop. Afterwards, he gave a special report on the topic of “Remote sensing and biosphere reserves”.

Secretary-General Wang Ding encouraged the participants to enhance their ability to apply remote sensing and geographical information technology to biosphere protection and desired to take advantage of this training to strengthen the cooperation with HIST in applying space technologies to biosphere protection.

Wang Kanghong, Shang Dong, and the teachers of the training course gave addresses presenting their willingness to offer software and technology support and to send their excellent training engineers for the training workshop.

This training, with the themes of “Remote sensing and geographical information technology and its application in biosphere reserve management”, was jointly sponsored by the UNESCO Beijing Office and the Chinese MAB National Committee and was organized by HIST. Participants included 22 biosphere experts from eight countries: China, Russia, Japan, Republic of Korea, DPRK, Mongolia, Iran and Indonesia. The teachers were acknowledged prominent experts in the fields of remote sensing and GIS technology. This was the second time for AIR to organize the training workshop, which can not only effectively strengthen the application capability of space technologies in East Asian biosphere reserves, but also provide scientific methods and valuable experiences for the development of a World Network of Biosphere Reserves, to which much attention has been paid by UNESCO, the Member States in Asia and related international institutions. The Training workshop will end on April 22nd, 2011.