Last month, at the EcoGIS Centre of Tashkent Institute of Irrigation and Melioration a training week was organized for specialists on effective use of the Environmental Information System for Uzbekistan (EIS-UZ). Important to note that this system is capable of processing and analyzing the data of environmental monitoring, revealing the tendencies appeared in the environment within certain periods of time and determining the main environmental problems.

The EIS-UZ includes the Environmental Information Database (EIDB), its website and the Geographic Information Systems (GIS). The system was developed by the joint project of the Government of of Uzbekistan and UNDP - "Enhancement of the environmental indicators database with GIS application to monitor the state of the environment in Uzbekistan".

Representatives of ministries and state agencies dealing with the issues of monitoring and assessment of the state of environment and management of the natural resources attended this training. The main aim of the training was to instruct the specialist-users to effectively manage the EIS integrated into the GIS. It was important for the project to share the knowledge with national specialists because, after the project’s completion by the end of this year, the EIS-UZ will be run by the State Committee on Nature Protection (SCNP). In its turn the SCNP together with other State Agencies will be responsible for the maintenance of the system including updating the environmental data and base map data, to manage and create new supplementary software and scenarios to interpret the data as well as to put these data analysis results onto maps.

The theoretical part of the training programme consisted of chapters "Technical description of the system", "Functions and capabilities of the system", "What is GIS and does it work?", "Using the EIDB-ArcGIS interface", "Using the Metadatabase" and other. Each theoretical lecture was supplemented by practical work. As a result, the training participants have studied the structure and components of the EIS-UZ, Environmental Indicators Database (EIDB) and its functionality; they have learned how to work with the EIDB using various result formats of a search. They also have studied the principles of GIS and learned to create modern chronological maps on the state of the environment using the environmental indicators data.