IIMS Training Held for Manila Bay Provinces

Tagaytay City, Philippines — Thirty-three participants from the central office and various regional offices of the Philippine Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) around Manila Bay, the provincial governments of Batangas, Bataan and Cavite and De La Salle University in Lipa, Batangas completed a training workshop on the Integrated Information Management System for Coastal and Marine Environment (IIMS) conducted from 23-26 February by DENR and PEMSEA.The training workshop trained regional and provincial staff newly-designated for IIMS and updated staff previously trained in IIMS on the updated IIMS which is now capable of handling river basin as well as State of the Coasts variables. Topics included database fundamentals, installation of IIMS, IIMS's data structure and various data tables, data classification, encoding and importing into IIMS.Action plans prepared by each of the DENR Regions and provincial governments aimed to: (1) secure mandate from respective leaders to develop and maintain IIMS; (2) orient others in the office or encoders to be hired in inputting data into the IIMS; (3) coordinate data collection and encoding between DENR Regional Offices and relevant provincial government offices; and (4) collect and encode data on water quality, pollution sources, biological habitat and resources, hazards, governance and socioeconomic data of relevant communities beginning year 2000. Participants aimed to encode most available data by early June 2010 to be in time for the planned training workshop on extracting, summarizing and depicting information from the data using IIMS as well as the quarterly reporting of the state of Manila Bay to the Supreme Court.