An Elephant is Faithful 100%

Folks,

I recently received the following appeal from the African Elephant Database.
They need help migrating to PostGIS and building out their application.

I, personally, cannot imagine a more compelling project which deserves the
PostgreSQL community's collective help. The elephant is our mascot! Plus
the AED folks introduced the idea of making this a general OSS project for
species conservation databases.

Who's available?

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I'm writing with to explore the possiblity of a collaboration between
Postgresql, PostGIS and the African Elephant Database (AED) of the IUCN/SSC
African Elephant Specialist Group (AfESG). Please allow me to begin by
giving you a little background on all those acronyms, in reverse order.

The AfESG is a group of elephant experts from across the African continent
who, aside from their daily jobs, disinterestedly lend their skills to
provide technical advice on elephant conservation and management. The
mission of the AfESG is to promote the long-term conservation of African
elephants throughout their range, and the group focuses its efforts on
capacity building, alleviation of human-elephant conflict, compilation and
dissemination of technical information, and the development of elephant
conservation strategies. Led by a volunteer chair, the AfESG has a small
secretariat in Nairobi, Kenya. Please see http://iucn.org/afesg/ for
details.

The AfESG is one of the most active of over 120 Specialist Groups of the
IUCN Species Survival Commission (SSC). The largest conservation grouping in
the world, the SSC is a worldwide network of over 7,000 volunteer experts
working to conserve the diversity of species found on Earth. The SSC is
responsible for the production of the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species.
See http://iucn.org/themes/ssc and http://www.redlist.org.

The SSC is the largest of the six commissions of IUCN - The World
Conservation Union. IUCN is the world's largest and most important
conservation network. The Union brings together 82 States, 111 government
agencies, more than 800 non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and some
10,000 scientists and experts from 181 countries in a unique worldwide
partnership. IUCN's mission is to influence, encourage and assist societies
throughout the world to conserve the integrity and diversity of nature and
to ensure that any use of natural resources is equitable and ecologically
sustainable. The World Conservation Union was founded in October 1948
following an international conference in Fontainebleau, France. IUCN HQ is
in Gland, Switzerland. See http://iucn.org/.

The African Elephant Database
The AED is a geographical information (GIS) system used to maintain an
accurate and up-to-date record on the distribution and abundance of African
Elephants. The AED is regularly updated, with data on elephant range and
numbers constantly being solicited from wildlife authorities and experts
across the continent, and a major report is produced every three years and
made available in the AfESG website (see http://iucn.org/afesg/aed/).

The AED currently runs in ESRI ArcGIS 9.1., in a personal geodatabase (MS
Access) format. We obtained ArcInfo through one of ESRI's conservation
program grants - but soon we were being asked to pay for maintenance charges
in excess of USD3,000 per annum. Despite these costs, we are considerably
constrained by the limitations of the set-up - including the MS Access 2Gb
size limit. If we were to upgrade our configuration to a full geodatabase
would involve acquiring ESRI's Spatial Database Engine (SDE) plus a
commercial RDBMS such as Oracle, DB2 or MS SQL server, at a one-off cost of
several thousand dollars and annual maintenance fees to match.

Such costs are well beyond our reach, we are hoping to build a more
sustainable solution using open source software. Although opensource GIS has
not evolved as much or as quickly as opensource relational databases, we do
have some hopes that a suitable system could be developed to maintain the
AED. The AED is the most comprehensive species database in existence, and we
believe there would be value in developing a turnkey solution that can be
used to maintain monitoring information on other species for which there are
relatively good data.

We've got the elephant and the database in common. If you think a
collaboration could be productive and mutually beneficial, please let me
know so that we can begin to explore the options.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely,

Julian Blanc
Manager, African Elephant Database
IUCN/SSC African Elephant Specialist Group
Email: julian(dot)blanc(at)iucn(dot)org
Web: http://iucn.org/afesg/
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Josh Berkus
Aglio Database Solutions
San Francisco